Measles on Rise Nationwide; Chicago Worst Hit

Sound trucks are moving through the streets of some of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods nightly warning parents that their children are being threatened by a potential killer--measles.

In public housing projects, a small army of nurses go door-to-door every day offering free immunizations against the disease.

Chicago’s health commissioner asked clergymen to warn their congregations of the spreading disease and to urge them to inoculate their children.

Warnings are also being broadcast on English- and Spanish-language radio and television stations and are being distributed in 150,000 leaflets.

It is the biggest mobilization to combat a public health problem here in at least a quarter century.

Worst Since 1980

Nationwide, more cases of measles have been reported this year than in any year since 1980, according to the national Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. Currently the worst outbreak of the disease is centered in metropolitan Chicago.

So far more than 800 cases of measles, most of them among preschool children, have been confirmed here. More than 1,000 cases have been documented in the entire metropolitan area, according to health officials and four deaths, two of them in the city, have been blamed on measles.

“We are doing everything under the sun to stop it,” said Richard Krieg, Chicago’s acting health commissioner. “We have taken extraordinary measures.”

“Once an outbreak gets started it’s hard to control,” said Fred Wilt, administrator of the Houston Public Health Department’s immunization program. “It’s like a fire. It will go whichever way the wind blows.”

The disease, a communicable virus, is characterized primarily by small red spots on the skin. It occurs most frequently in children.

Houston and the state of California, along with Chicago, account for almost half of the cases recorded this year by federal health officials.

Among Chicago’s extraordinary measures are easy-to-get, free vaccinations. Seven centers have been opened to give shots and booths are being set up at some weekend neighborhood festivals. Vaccine has been sent to 75 private health and community service facilities with the understanding they will not charge for shots. Off-duty nurses have been stationed in hospital emergency rooms to provide inoculations.

All Chicago police and firemen have been offered vaccine and all emergency room physicians have been ordered by the health department to be immunized.

Chicago health officials are concentrating their education and inoculation campaign in low income black and Latino neighborhoods.

“We tend to see lower immunization rates among people that are economically deprived in the inner city,” said Jim Mize, a public health adviser with the Centers for Disease Control. “Vaccination rates are often less among those groups than among suburbanites.”

Since the first of the year 90 outbreaks have been recorded in 36 states. At least 20 deaths nationwide have been blamed on the disease this year. So far the Centers for Disease Control has logged 8,227 cases nationwide, a 371% increase over 1988.

Chicago health officials have traced the outbreak to Bradley University in Peoria where several students came down with the disease just before their Easter break. Students returning to Chicago homes for the holiday vacation were believed to have brought the measles with them, Krieg said.

In Houston, the scene of the nation’s other major outbreak this year, 1,286 cases were have been reported since last October. However in July there were only 16 new cases.

“We are very much on the downhill side and have been that way since April,” said Houston’s Wilt.

In California there have been 1,848 cases of measles so far this year according to the Centers for Disease Control. A spokeswoman for Los Angeles County Health Services said that through July 1 there were 664 reported measles cases of which 405 have been confirmed. “It’s near epidemic,” she said.

Staff writers J. Michael Kennedy in Houston and Ben Sullivan in Los Angeles contributed to this story.