DENVER -- Arizona health officials were tracking more than 1,000 people Thursday, including at least 195 children, who they said might have been exposed to measles as part of an outbreak that began at Disneyland in Southern California.
Arizona has seven confirmed cases of measles, and officials in three counties in the Phoenix area -- Maricopa, Gila and Pinal -- are asking residents who have not been vaccinated and who might have been exposed, to stay home from school, work or day care for 21 days.
The announcement comes as thousands of people are arriving in Phoenix for the Super Bowl on Sunday.
"This is a critical point in this outbreak," the state health director, Will Humble, wrote on his blog. Any missed cases, he wrote, could cause "a long and protracted outbreak."
Health officials said one of the seven cases of measles involves a woman who walked into a Maricopa County pediatric clinic recently, potentially exposing about 200 children. The woman had been in contact with a family that had traveled to Disneyland, but she did not know she had the disease.
Measles is a viral illness that spreads easily through coughing and sneezing. Before vaccinations became common in 1963, about 3 million to 4 million Americans contracted the disease each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 400 to 500 died from it.
The recent outbreak began in California and has spread to several states, including Utah, Washington, Oregon and Colorado, as well as to Mexico. It has heightened concerns among health officials that opposition to child vaccinations has prompted a resurgence of an illness that the country believed it had eliminated in 2000.
In Arizona, state law mandates that children receive measles and other vaccinations before they attend school, unless a parent files for an exemption citing personal beliefs. In recent years, the state has seen a rise in the number of parents who choose not to vaccinate their children: In 2004, 1.6 percent of Arizona schoolchildren were not vaccinated; by 2013 that number had risen to 4.7 percent.
"It's something that the state has been concerned about," said Dr. Cara Christ, the state's chief medical officer. "It allows the disease to get into those areas and really establish a foothold, and once it establishes a foothold, it's very, very difficult to control."
California, which also has seen a rising anti-vaccination trend in recent years, now has 79 confirmed cases of the measles. That state recently changed the law to make it slightly more difficult for parents to opt out of vaccinating their children.
A spokesman for the Maricopa County Public Health Department in Arizona, Jeanene Fowler, said the outbreak had prompted a surge in requests for vaccinations.
"If you're trying to make lemonade out of the situation," she said, "that's the best we can ask for."
A Section on 01/30/2015