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Rubella virus eliminated in U.S.
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| Contributor | None Entered |
| Last Edited | None Entered Mar 30, 2005 11:57pm |
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| Category | Event |
| News Date | Monday, March 21, 2005 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | The invisible "chain of transmission" of rubella virus has been broken in the United States. With it disappears a disease that a little more than a generation ago struck fear in the heart of every pregnant woman.
Fewer than 10 people a year in this country now contract the infection known popularly as German measles. Since 2002, all cases have been traceable to foreigners who carried the virus in from abroad.
Between those rare events, however, no rubella virus has circulated in the United States because the bug simply cannot find enough susceptible hosts. After years of assiduous vaccination, virtually the entire U.S. population is immune.
Mild and often entirely unnoticed in children, rubella infection can be devastating to developing fetuses. A woman infected with the virus in the first three months of pregnancy will probably suffer miscarriage, or deliver a stillborn or permanently disabled child. In the last great U.S. epidemic of rubella -- 40 years ago, before there was a vaccine against the disease -- about 12,000 babies were born deaf or deaf and blind.
The outbreak so swelled the number of congenitally deaf Americans that Gallaudet University, the District of Columbia's educational institution for the hearing-impaired, eventually acquired a second campus to accommodate them.
"This is a milestone," said Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It is a major step forward in our ability to eliminate this problem in the Western Hemisphere, and then in the world." She will announce rubella's disappearance from the United States at the opening today of the National Immunization Conference here.
The disease's decline began after the introduction of rubella vaccine in 1969. The infection's virtual disappearance, however, required more than high levels of immunization in the United States. The disease also needed to become less common in the Caribbean and Latin America, the source of most imported cases. Ma |
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