The Vermont Department of Health is asking health care providers and schools to be on the lookout for people with measles symptoms after the highly infectious disease was detected in Washington County’s wastewater last week.
Detection of measles in wastewater means that somebody carrying the virus was in the Washington County area last week, but it does not identify a case. It’s unknown, for example, whether it’s a single person or multiple people who are carrying the virus.
The state tests sewage from treatment facilities in six Vermont communities — Burlington, Essex Junction, South Burlington, Middlebury, Montpelier, and Ludlow — several times a week to monitor for certain diseases. This is the first time measles has been detected through the program, which began testing for the virus last summer.
With cases of the disease surging across the United States, Vermont Health Commissioner Rick Hildebrant says this test result is actually something of a good thing.
“This means that our early detection system is working,” he said.
The state also has “very high vaccination rates,” he said, which means that the likelihood of spread remains low. So far, Vermont has not recorded any outbreaks. And while Quebec is experiencing a small outbreak, Hildebrant said Vermont’s neighbors in New England have only seen isolated cases thus far.
Immunization rates for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine are generally high in Vermont, but coverage is uneven. About 97% of all K-12 students had received the MMR vaccine last school year, according to state data, although rates for kindergarteners, which are the best gauge of current habits, are lower, at 94%.
The best protection against measles is the MMR vaccine, which is more than 90% effective at preventing infection. Unvaccinated individuals are vulnerable to severe complications from the virus: about 1 in 5 will be hospitalized.
To the alarm of the country’s public health establishment, anti-vaccine messaging and alternative health remedies have been repeatedly amplified by federal officials in the second Trump administration.
After U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promoted cod liver oil containing vitamin A as an “almost miraculous” cure for measles, parents rushed out to buy supplements — and may have inadvertently given their children liver damage, Texas doctors told the New York Times last year. (While doctors will sometimes use vitamin A to treat severe cases of measles, the wrong dose can be toxic.)
Cases, however, are rising fast. The largest outbreak in the country, in South Carolina, has now surpassed last year’s Texas outbreak. This Sunday, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who now helms the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, went on CNN to plead with Americans to “take the vaccine, please.”
“I certainly don't agree with everything that Mehmet Oz says — frankly, most things that he says. But on that we agree,” Hildebrant said.
