"Leprosy, long imagined extinct, reappeared:" This and That

THIS:

There were land riots as the jaunting poor deserted slums to squat in plains and forests, raiding the livestock and wildlife.

There was a revolution in home and office building: labyrinths and masking devices had to be introduced to prevent unlawful entry by jaunting. There were crashes and panics and strikes and famines as pre-jaunte industries failed.

Plagues and pandemics raged as jaunting vagrants carried disease and vermin into defenseless countries. Malaria, elephantiasis, and the breakbone fever came north to Greenland; rabies returned to England after an absence of three hundred years. The Japanese beetle, the citrous scale, the chestnut blight, and the elm borer spread to every corner of the world, and from one forgotten pesthole in Borneo, leprosy, long imagined extinct, reappeared. -- THE STARS MY DESTINATION Alfred Bester. Published in 1956

THAT:

Report: Measles Outbreak in Minnesota Somali Community Imported by Traveler from Foreign Country

The measles outbreak within Minnesota’s Somali community continues to spread to more parts of the state. “Officials . . . believe it was imported by a traveler from a foreign country, since measles no longer occurs naturally in the United States,” the Star Tribune reports. Late Friday, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) announced that the total number of cases has now grown to 32, and “28 of the cases are Somali Minnesotan.”

The recent outbreak has set a 20-year record high for the number of measles cases reported in Minnesota. Between 1997, when MDH began tracking reported cases of measles on its website, and 2016, the record number of reported cases of measles in the state was 26, which happened in 2011. The current number of reported cases of measles at the four-month mark of 2017, 32, is already six cases more than that 2011 previous record.

Measles Outbreak Widens in Minnesota

The U.S. isn’t the only region reporting measles outbreaks. Gaps in vaccination coverage has also led to a surge in European incidents of this infectious disease in the past few months. During the first two months of 2017, more than 1,500 measles cases were reported from 14 European countries due to “an accumulation of unvaccinated individuals”, said officials from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

In 10 countries — Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain and Sweden — the number of cases reported in January-February 2017 was more than double that of the first two months of 2016.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at April 30, 2017 8:20 AM