With vaccination rates Among the American children’s gardens decreasing regularly in recent years and the secretary of health and social services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promising to re -examine the vaccination calendar on childhood, measles and other infectious diseases previously eliminated could become more common. A new analysis Published today by epidemiologists from the University of Stanford is trying to quantify these impacts.
Using a computer model, the authors found that with current state vaccination rates, measles could recover and present itself regularly in the United States over the next two decades. Their model predicted this result in 83% of simulations. If current vaccination rates remain the same, the model estimated that the United States could see more than 850,000 cases, 170,000 hospitalizations and 2,500 deaths over the next 25 years. The results appear in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“I don’t see it as a speculative. It is a modeling exercise, but it is based on good figures, “explains Jeffrey Griffiths, professor of public health and community medicine at the Tofts University School of Medicine in Boston, which was not involved in the study. “The big point is that measles is very likely to become endemic quickly if we continue in this way.”
The United States has declared measles eliminated in 2000 after decades of successful vaccination campaigns. Elimination means that there has been no transmission chain of the disease within a country lasting more than 12 months. The current measles epidemic in Texas could however endanger this status. With more than 600 cases, 64 hospitalizations and two deaths, it is the largest epidemic that the state has seen since 1992, when 990 cases were linked to a single epidemic. Nationally, the United States has seen 800 cases of measles so far in 2025The most since 2019. Last year there were 285 cases.
“We are really at a time when we should try to increase vaccination as much as possible,” explains Mathew Kiang, assistant professor of epidemiology and health health at the University of Stanford and one of the authors of the article.
Vaccination on childhood in the United States was on a downward trend. The data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the vaccination programs for states and premises revealed that from the 2019-2020 school year to the 2022-2023 school year, the coverage of kindergarten children with state-required vaccinations decreased by 95% to around 93%. These vaccines included MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), DTAP (diphtheria, tetanus and acellular darling), polio and chickenpox.
In this study, Kiang and its colleagues have modeled each state separately, taking into account their vaccination rates, which varied from 88% to 96% for measles, from 78% to 91% for diphtheria and 90% to 97% for the polio vaccine. Other variables included the demography of the population, the effectiveness of vaccines, the risk of importation of illness, the typical duration of infection, the time between exposure and the capacity to propagate disease, and the contagion of the disease, also known as the number of basic reproduction. The measles is very contagious, with one person on average to infect 12 to 18 people. The researchers used 12 as a basic reproduction number in their study.
