Second Measles-Positive Death, March 6, 2025

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/measles-new-mexico-resident-tests-positive-death-rcna195231

Measles Death (link)

Today a second person died with measles. This time it was an adult that tested positive after death. There are a couple of issues to address with this case:

1. We do not have clinical information about this patient. In other words, we do not know if they were exhibiting classic measles symptoms.

2. The notion of a postmortem test for measles would be extremely unusual if the person didn’t manifest at least some of the classic symptoms such as high fever and rash. On the other hand, it is possible that health departments in the affected areas are testing everyone postmortem, just as we did for COVID-19 back in 2020-2021. This type of thing is done for epidemiological purposes and can produce a wealth of important data.

3. If this adult patient was a measles-related death (and not a death from other cause that then tested positive for measles in routine testing), then this would make 2 deaths among approximately 200 known cases. Why is that significant? Because measles mortality is typically 1 in 1,000 cases. This means at current, the mortality rate is around 1 in 100, or ten times higher than expected. Could this be anomaly? Could this be a strain of measles that causes more significant clinical effects? Time will tell. But one death from this disease is too many.

   

   Measles virus (color enhanced).

I have to stress this concept because it seems like many in the population do not understand this: vaccine preventable diseases such as measles, rubella, and tetanus are rare not because the disease “went away”, but because we have effective ways to prevent it. Put another way, the organisms that cause these diseases are still all around us in our environment, but if our immune system is primed, we don’t get the infection.

Make no mistake, as vaccination rates drop, we will see all these diseases return and more. The only thing we can do is educate and hope that the education can reach those who are targets of propaganda from the multimillion dollar anti-vaccine movement.

—DLW