In March 2000, the nation’s leading measles experts gathered at a Hyatt hotel in Atlanta, just a few miles away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to make a historic decision.
After two days of poring over data, they came to a unanimous verdict: Measles, which had infected nearly every American child by age 15 just a few decades earlier, had been eliminated in the United States.
Attendees saw it as a public health milestone, one that the chair of the meeting credited to “millions of parents and children, hundreds of thousands of health workers, and thousands of policymakers and legislators.”
“I walked away with the feeling that this was very monumental,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, one of the physicians at the meeting. He kept a white binder from the meeting, filled with measles data, as a memento.
More than 20 years later, measles experts gathered once again this week. The group is widely expected to announce that the United States, which has logged more than 5,200 cases this year, has lost its measles elimination status, a designation given to countries that have not had continuous spread of measles for more than a year.
Source: www.nytimes.com
