Utah’s health care providers are being forced to adapt to America’s new reality, in which vaccine-preventable diseases become common again. Unable to contain the spread of measles—now detected in every health jurisdiction in the state—providers are trying to mitigate harm:
As officials tried to do the best they could, the outbreak spread north, hopping from one under-vaccinated community to the next. When health officials in Utah County spoke with people who had tested positive, they often had no connection to other known cases. “Pretty quickly, we started to lose the links,” said Michael Leman, the county health department’s nursing director. Contact tracing, the cornerstone of containment, was failing.
Every week, the state health department posted a growing list of locations on its website—a Trader Joe’s, a Mormon temple, an aquarium, preschools—that people had visited while contagious. But many people who tested positive hadn’t been to those places, Leman said. “They could have gotten it at Walmart. They could have gotten it walking through a mall,” he said. “I mean, just anywhere in the public they could have been exposed.”
More stories about vaccines
In Arizona, a Fight Against a Deadly Fungus Is Under Threat From Trump’s Health Policies
“What one doctor’s quest to stop valley fever says about America’s preparedness for climate-driven disease.”
The Firefighter With O.C.D. and the Vaccine He Believed Would Kill Him
“For years, Timmy Reen tried to hide his compulsions and rituals from everyone at his New York City firehouse — until his secret was forced out in the open.”
Did Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Really Tell Me I Gave My Son Cancer?
“The likely next secretary of Health and Human Services scared me with a cruel and misleading statement—and that’s the danger he poses to parents everywhere.”
