INFO:

The United States faces millions of measles cases over the next 25 years if vaccination rates for the disease drop 10 percent, according to new research published Thursday. No change in the current vaccination rate would result in hundreds of thousands of measles cases over the same period, according to a mathematical model produced by a team of Stanford University researchers. “Our country is on a tipping point for measles to once again become a common household disease,” said Nathan Lo, a Stanford physician and author of the study published in the medical journal JAMA. At current state-level vaccination rates, the model predicts that measles could become entrenched, resulting in “hundreds of thousands of cases, where deaths are commonplace and hospitalizations are happening all the time,” said Lo, who researches the transmission of infectious diseases and the impact of public health interventions. Caption from article by Lena H. Sun