Two adults living at a New York City migrant shelter were diagnosed with measles, a treatable but highly contagious respiratory illness, city health officials said on Friday.
The city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is coordinating with the local hospital system “to ensure that anyone who’s been exposed gets the support and resources they need,” according to a news release from the department. As of Friday, the circle of people who might have been infected was limited to those residing on one floor of the shelter, health officials said. The shelter, on Hall Street, is in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The close quarters of shelters can often exacerbate the spread of respiratory illnesses. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the coronavirus spread rapidly through crowded homeless shelters in the city.
Measles can cause high fever, coughing and rashes, among other symptoms. It can also lead to serious health complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis, especially for children under the age of 5. Symptoms can appear one to two weeks after contact with the virus that causes measles, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A person with the illness can infect up to nine out of 10 people nearby if they are not vaccinated against it, according to the agency.
Vaccinations against the disease offer a high degree of protection: Two doses of the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are 97 percent effective, according to the C.D.C. One dose is 93 percent effective.
In New York City, the two-dose vaccination rate among kindergartners during the 2022-23 school year was about 97 percent, according to city data.
However, the city has already reported more cases of the disease this year than it did in all of 2023. As of July 12, there have been 11 confirmed cases, according to city data. One case was reported last year, and zero cases were reported between 2020 and 2022.
The same upward trend is reflected nationally, as reported cases of measles in the United States have more than doubled so far this year compared with all of last year, worrying health officials. As of Thursday, 167 cases had been reported across the country, C.D.C. data shows. And 58 cases were reported nationally in all of 2023.
There have also been 13 outbreaks of the disease in the United States so far this year, according to the agency. A measles outbreak is defined as three or more related cases of the illness.
In May, the C.D.C. reported that a single measles case at a Chicago migrant shelter in March had led to an outbreak of 57 cases. Most of the cases were among unvaccinated people, according to the agency.
Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the C.D.C., said in March that the national rise in measles cases should “alert us, rather than alarm us.”
The disease was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, but pockets of outbreaks have emerged in recent decades, particularly as anti-vaccination movements have grown.
In 2019, measles broke out among Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County, N.Y., before spreading to Michigan and causing the largest national outbreak of measles since 1992. New York City reported 605 cases that year.
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