After reports of 6 cases of measles in Kansas last week, there are new reports of two confirmed and two probable cases of measles in Indiana.
Of course measles in the Midwest isn't new. Last year, there were large outbreaks of measles in Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
What may be a little different about one of these new cases though is just how many people they may have exposed while they were contagious. An alert from the Indiana State Department of Health states that "one of the infected individuals visited the Super Bowl festivities in downtown Indianapolis on Friday, February 3."
These "Super Bowl festivities" included the Super Bowl Village, where up to 200,000 people from all over the country may have been exposed to measles.
This incident is a good reminder about the importance of having high rates of vaccination in the community. With low rates, a large group of non-immune people would almost certainly get sick if they were exposed in this type of "Super Bowl experience." With lots of visitors from out-of-town and out-of-state, cases would continue to spread until we had a full blown epidemic on our hands. As it stands now, with fairly high vaccine rates, hopefully there won't be any more cases, and if there are, they can quickly be contained before spreading any further.
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