Measles kills thousands of children across the globe every year.
Povorozniuk Liudmyla/Getty Images
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Povorozniuk Liudmyla/Getty Images
It’s a scourge that has afflicted mankind for more than a thousand years. And it’s what keeps Adam Ratner up at night: measles.
“It is the most infectious disease that we know by far — much more infectious than flu, much more infectious than COVID or polio or Ebola or anything else that I can think of,” says Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease physician in New York City.
In his new book, Booster Shots, Ratner makes the case that the control of measles is a test of how good our public health institutions are. And the fact that it is making a comeback is a bad sign.
“When vaccination levels start to fall, we see measles outbreaks first,” he says. “And then those are often followed by outbreaks of other vaccine-preventable diseases, things that are a little less contagious than measles,” he says, adding that “it’s only February and we have already had, you know, small clusters of measles in…
