Why New York’s Rockland County is ground zero for one of the worst US measles outbreaks in 20 years
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Patricia Schnabel Ruppert, the health commissioner of an outlying New York suburban county, is feeling “overwhelmed”.
Since October she has been waging an uphill fight to quell one of the worst US measles outbreaks in 20 years.
Among her daily battles: having to constantly repeat that the vaccine does not cause other diseases, that it does not lead to autism, and that the practice of using fetal tissue to produce the vaccine ended decades ago.
Pushing back against such “junk science” absorbs a good deal of her energy as she works to educate and persuade the 300,000 residents of Rockland County to cooperate with health authorities and alert them to any new cases of disease.
In 27 years of practising medicine, Ruppert said, this is “one of the most challenging health crises I have had to deal with”.
As of Friday, measles – officially eliminated from the United States in 2000 – had struck 167 people in this county along the Hudson River, including nine new cases last week.
Among the six regional outbreaks of measles reported by the Centres for Disease Control (CDC), the leading public health institute in the US, Rockland County’s is the most concentrated.