The largest U.S. measles outbreak in recent history isn’t the one that started in December at Disneyland. It happened months earlier in Ohio’s Amish country, where 383 people fell ill after unvaccinated Amish missionaries traveled to the Philippines and returned with the virus.
The Ohio episode drew far less attention, even though the number of cases was almost four times that of the Southern California outbreak, because it seemed to pose little threat outside close-knit religious communities.
The Disneyland outbreak has already spread well beyond the theme parks that attract tens of thousands of visitors from around the globe, who could then return home with the virus. Disease investigators for weeks raced to identify measles-stricken patients, track down potential contacts and quarantine them if necessary.
Public health experts say success at containing the outbreak will largely depend on how many unvaccinated people get the measles shot.
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Mike Stobbe in New York and Raquel Maria Dillon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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Contact Alicia Chang on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia .
