The Spectacular Success of the Measles Vaccine

By: vivian on sexta-feira, fevereiro 13, 2015

themendozaline:

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By David Mendoza - Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Recently, there has been increased attention paid to the resurgence of measles in the United States. But despite this uptick, it’s important to remember how effective the measles vaccine has been at reducing the prevalence of the disease. Since 1963, when John F. Enders helped develop the first vaccine against the measles, the number of cases of this respiratory disease has declined considerably. By the end the 1960s, according to Samuel L. Katz, Chairman Emeritus of Pediatrics at Duke University, “annual measles cases had been reduced by more than 90%.” Immediately before then, approximately 400 people died and more than 3 million people were infected by measles every year.

The chart at the top of the page displays the remarkable reduction in the measles incidence rate per 100,000 people in the United States. The incidence rate is defined by the CDC as the number of new cases of a disease over a given period that is then divided by the average population of a locality. So in this cases, the incidence rate measures the number of measles cases reported to the CDC adjusted for each state’s population. The chart is ordered from the states with the highest average incidence rate at the top and the states with the lowest rates at the bottom. I gathered the data for this visualization from Project Tycho, a database maintained by the University of Pittsburgh. The researchers at Project Tycho culled their data from weekly surveillance reports from the NNDSS. Specifically, I used Level 1 data, which has been standardized into a common format for easier analysis.

I provide more context below.

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