Burden of Measles

Post #1190

Mar 05, 2025

Disease burden encompasses morbidity and mortality. This post will focus on the mortality aspect of measles to determine if recent news stories are over-hyping measles as a threat to humanity. The death rate from infectious diseases overall has been coming down worldwide, though the USA death rate is mostly constant:

The worldwide death rate from infectious disease has dropped by two-thirds since 1980. But in the USA, the 1980s were a time when vaccine manufacturers were given a carte blanche regarding moving forward without worry of getting sued (liability waiver). This resulted in a slew of vaccines and an increase in infectious death rates.

Here is a zoomed-in version of the USA temporarily getting worse, though keep in mind that critics and detractors will cite HIV/AIDS as the driver of this increase:

And here are those same death rates when paired to flu shot uptake rates:

If attempting to explain the rising infectious disease death by the rising uptake of flu shots, then a good model would be logarithmic, leading to an R-squared value of 0.78. But after 1994, infectious disease death rates started to come back down to where they had begun in 1980. With measles, the CDC seems to think that there is a big threat:

But when looking at the infection fatality rate of measles, you find out that it is safer than flu. Here are cases and deaths from way back in 1962 in England & Wales (purple markings added). After two consecutive weeks of over 7,000 measles cases each week and 0 deaths each week — with the first week ending on 10 Nov 1962, this happened:

Week ending 24 Nov 1962

That’s the third consecutive week, but what about the fourth week?

Week ending 1 Dec 1962

That’s over 30,000 cases in 4 weeks of time, but still no record of any measles deaths. Here is the fifth consecutive week:

Week ending 8 Dec 1962

It looks like the media hype surrounding measles is overblown then, because in developed nations at least, the infection fatality rate of measles is even less than found with seasonal flu. While there may be some developing parts of the world where measles could be a health threat, it does not appear that that is true in developed parts.

Health warnings about measles appear to be based on perception-management (i.e., government propaganda), rather than being data-driven and based on the science.