Measles

Reference 1 tells me that 'the US now boasts the highest number of reported measles cases since the disease was eliminated in the country in 2000'. Bing turns up reference 2 which offers the chart above, helpfully made available to download. Which does indeed show a sharp rise this year - but does it amount to much in a country of more than 300 million people? Is the average Maga type going to shrug, muttering the adolescent 'Care'?

Bing turns up reference 3, which suggests that the US is indeed an outlier and reminds me that measles is a serious, potentially fatal, complaint. It is also very infectious. On the upside:

'... A vaccination rate of 95 per cent with two doses of the measles vaccine in every community each year is needed to prevent measles outbreaks and achieve herd immunity, which protects infants too young for measles vaccination and other people for whom it is not recommended due to medical conditions, like those who are immunocompromised...'

Which tells us that having a vaccine sceptic in charge of health in the US is probably not helpful. 

A story which is firmly corroborated by Gemini. I have not attempted to check his story, but I would be surprised if he were very wrong about this.

Maybe I will check the bit that says: '... A 2012–13 study in the UK found that the cost of managing a regional measles outbreak was 20 times higher than the cost of the vaccinations that would have prevented it....'. And this looks to be without attempting to put any kind of a price on just being ill, never mind doing anything about it.

A worry that one does not know what biases might be creeping into his stories, if not now, perhaps in the future. How susceptible are they to interference by politically motivated senior executives of Alphabet Inc? The signs from the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, are not encouraging.

Ghebrehewet

Bing turns up quite a lot of stuff about the 2012-2013 outbreak of measles in the UK, but nothing on costings. While Google and Gemini between them turn up reference 6. And ResearchGate, given the reference, gives me the thing itself. A first glance suggests that Gemini got it right, but I shall try to return to the matter later this morning.

PS 1: BH still remembers catching measles as a seven year old in East Sheen, which had her quite ill for a while and off-school for several weeks. Including a painful ear leading to a perforated ear-drum. While I, being out in the country, escaped this one.

PS 2: reference 5 tells me a little about the havoc wrought by European diseases after the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. Smallpox, influenza and measles; I dare say among others. A huge numbers of deaths, at a time when most Europeans had acquired a fair amount of immunity. There was even a serious outbreak of measles in a remote Amazonian tribe in the 1960s.

References

Reference 1: Brain drain is undermining America’s scientific edge: Policy decisions grounded in Maga talking points are helping to fuel a PhD exodus from government - Anjana Ahuja, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 2: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html.

Reference 3: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/02/1166940.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/03/crims-on-floor-of-house.html. Earlier notice of reference 5.

Reference 5: Ancient Americans: Rewriting the history of the New World - Charles C. Mann - 2005.

Reference 6: The economic cost of measles: Healthcare, public health and societal costs of the 2012–13 outbreak in Merseyside, UK - Sam Ghebrehewet, Dominic Thorrington, Siobhan Farmer, James Kearney, Deidre Blissett, Hugh McLeod, Alex Keenan - 2016.