Even Adults May Soon Be Vulnerable to ‘Childhood’ Diseases
There were more than 32,000 cases of whooping cough in 2024, the highest tally in a decade. In California alone, the disease struck 2,000 people between January and October last year.
More than 60 infants younger than 4 months were hospitalized in the state. One died.
Whooping cough, or pertussis, is just the most stark example of what happens when vaccination rates decline. But it is far from the only one.
The pandemic interrupted childhood immunizations across the country, and rates have not yet recovered. As a result, hundreds of thousands of children are increasingly vulnerable to diseases once largely relegated to history books.
Most of them predominantly affect young children, like measles, mumps and rubella. But if immunizations continue to fall over the next few years — because of rising distrust, or more restrictive federal policies — preventable infectious diseases will resurface in all age groups, experts say.
“It might take a year or two, but there’s no question,” said Pejman Rohani, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Georgia.
“We will have outbreaks,” he said.
It’s not just the unvaccinated who will have to worry. Even adults who were vaccinated decades ago may find themselves vulnerable to what are now considered childhood diseases.
Most people have forgotten the dangers of childhood diseases, said Dr. Alex Richter, a clinical immunologist at the University of Birmingham in Britain, where there are worrying upticks in measles and mumps.
Just a few decades ago, many children under the age of 5 died from infectious illnesses. Now children are more threatened by traffic accidents, drug overdoses and gun violence while disease has faded as a concern.
“That could all change if we don’t continue with vaccine policies,” Dr. Richter said.
High vaccination rates in a community protect not just the vaccinated, but also people who cannot receive some vaccines or who may not respond to them because of certain medical conditions, their age or weakened immune systems.
If fewer people are vaccinated, “we are making an active decision to make the world a less safe place for a significant proportion of the population,” Dr. Richter said.
For example, rubella, or German measles, can be dangerous for pregnant women and their babies. Yet pregnant women cannot be immunized against the disease because the vaccine contains a weakened live virus.
These days, they are typically not at risk, because there are fewer than a dozen rubella cases in the United States each year. That may change if vaccination rates drop. Worldwide, rubella is the leading vaccine-preventable cause of birth defects.
“If you’ve got nonimmune mothers catching rubella, then you have the lifelong complications of blindness and deafness and everything else,” Dr. Richter said.
Even Adults May Soon Be Vulnerable to ‘Childhood’ Diseases - The New York Times