Measles Vaccine

A government-sponsored study of two measles vaccines, begun in 1989 during a major U.S. epidemic and conducted on nearly 1,500 minority infants in Los Angeles, failed to disclose to parents that one of the vaccines was experimental, federal health officials said Sunday. "A mistake was made," said Dr. David Satcher, director of the Atlanta-based federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the study sponsors. "It shocked me."

As the summer vacation season nears, measles cases are on the rise in California, driven by unimmunized travelers infected elsewhere who are entering the state, health officials said Friday. "We see that as worrisome," Dr. Gilberto Chavez, deputy director of the California Department of Public Health, said in an interview. Those infected with measles include not only unimmunized Californians traveling abroad, but foreign visitors to the state and others who simply came in contact with infected travelers, Chavez said.

U.S. immunization rates for the most common childhood vaccines continue to remain near or above the target level of 90% coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. Rates for the newest vaccines, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B and rotavirus, also continue to grow, the agency reported in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report . Less than 1% of children had not received any vaccines. "Today's report is generally very reassuring, despite reports we have seen" about parents being reluctant to immunize children because of fears of a link between vaccines and autism.

The state of California said Tuesday that it will investigate whether PacifiCare of California is violating state law by refusing to recommend a chicken-pox vaccine to its members. The HMO, a statewide subsidiary of PacifiCare Health Systems Inc. in Cypress, has come under fire from a consumer group for failing to endorse the widely accepted preventive measure.

I have lived and practiced medicine in many different places in the world and witnessed epidemics of measles, polio, mumps and whooping cough. It still hurts to remember my first week of practice when I attended to the only case of diphtheria I was to ever witness. Working with all the town's pediatricians, we failed to save that child's life. Now I have been practicing pediatrics in the United States for over 30 years.

Dr. Thomas C. Peebles, a World War II bomber pilot who isolated the measles virus, setting the stage for development of the vaccine that freed the world from the deadly scourge, died July 8 at his home in Port Charlotte, Fla. He was 89. Peebles also led a team that showed the tetanus vaccine could be given every decade instead of every year, developed a way to add fluoride to children's vitamins to prevent tooth decay and founded one of the country's...

A generation ago, doctors began routinely vaccinating every child against measles. No one worried much about what would happen when the children grew up and had babies of their own. In hindsight, perhaps they should have. These new mothers fail to pass on the strong resistance to measles at birth that an eternity of women before them have done. The result is a new problem: measles in the very young.

Measles, once a common rite of passage for U.S. children, has all but been wiped out in this country, federal health officials announced Thursday. In 1998, there were only 100 cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of them believed to have originated outside the United States.

If you can't track down your vaccination records, there's no harm in getting reimmunized for measles, experts say. And in an effort to quell the measles outbreak at USC, which felled star quarterback Rodney Peete and about 37 other students, free vaccinations will be offered to USC students from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. today and Wednesday in front of the campus statue of Tommy Trojan. Those born after 1956 who can't recall if they've been immunized should be vaccinated again, doctors recommend.

Los Angeles County residents can receive free measles vaccinations Saturday at any of 18 clinics set up by the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. in an effort to stop the spread of the area's worst measles epidemic since the 1970s. So far this year, seven Los Angeles County residents have died and 2,650 cases of measles have been reported, compared to 1,202 cases in all of 1989. More than half of these cases were among preschool children, 70% of them Latinos.