As the measles spread, some doctors see the virus for the first time

Until this year, Dr. Leila Myrick has never seen the case of the Oder.

He doesn’t remember professors at a medical school talking about a virus. When she saw photos of the characteristic red rash on exams on the exercise board, she rejected her textbooks to find out what it was.

“Most practicing doctors, nowadays, will not see it in real life,” she said.

But in the last few months Dr. Myrick, a family medicine doctor at Seminole in Texas, has treated about 20 Oder people. He will probably see more cases as a raging epidemic that infected 481 people in Texas and kills one child. In Texas, Up-to-date Mexico and other parts of the country in which cases appeared, Healthcare employees, such as Dr. Myrick, are confronted for the first time with a highly contagious virus. On Friday Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 607 confirmed cases were reported Odra in the United States this year – more than twice as much as the number of cases observed in all 2024.

“The generation of doctors who are currently in most patients’ treatment have not seen what the Odra case looks different than from a textbook or video,” said Dr. Andy Lubell, Medical Director of True North Pediatrics in Pennsylvania, where the doctor diagnosed the first matter of practice in March.

The United States declared that the Oder eliminated in 2000 in the whole country cases still appear throughout the country, sometimes sowing larger epidemics. But public health experts are worried that this year Odra can become more common in more places. The virus spreads quickly in some parts of the country, and vaccination indicators throughout the country have been falling for years.

“I remember how I found out about the Odra, German Oder, all these things,” said Dr. Seth Coombs, a doctor from Lovington Medical Clinic in Up-to-date Mexico, who this year saw his first case of the Oder. “But you just don’t see them. And just like anything, if you don’t utilize it, you will lose it.”

Oder can sometimes be hard to recognize, especially if your doctor does not think about it. Infection causes a characteristic red rash, but the appearance may take days. Earlier, someone from the Oder can only have a fever, cough, runny nose and red, watery eyes – symptoms that imitate the symptoms of many other viral infections.

“Every day we see from 120 to 200 patients in the emergency department,” said Dr. Michael Koster, director of the pediatric infectious department at Hasbro Children’s on Rhode Island. “And probably 70 percent of them are children coming with fever.”

In January, Dr. Koster said that the staff at the hospital’s emergency was treated a child who was dehydrated and had a fever, and then sent a family home. A few days later, the baby returned, still with high fever. It wasn’t until the second visit that the doctors realized that the child had measles.

Even when people have a rash, doctors who do not know the cases of measles or do not have an infection on the top of the mind, they can confuse it in an allergic reaction to medicines, said Dr. Laraine Walk, a doctor of an infectious disease in Michigan Medicine.

Diagnosis of the Odra is very essential, largely because doctors want to isolate patients who can be contagious. Odra can stay in the air for two hours after an infected person leaves the room. If someone with a virus appears on an ambulance, they can spread the virus widely.

Quick care is also essential. Doctors confirm the diagnosis in laboratory tests and work to relieve symptoms, often using drugs to reduce fever and make sure that patients remained irrigated to counteract lost flowers. They observe complications closely: about one in 20 children develop pneumonia, which is the most common cause of the death of measles in juvenile children. Suppliers also monitor brain swelling, which can occur in uncommon cases and lead to hearing and sight loss, intellectual disability and eternal neurological damage.

Doctors are now working on a quick restoration to speed. In UCLA Health, attending doctors, they teach residents and medical students about how to detect signs of infections that are more hard to recognize, like diminutive white dots that can appear in the cheeks of an infected patient.

Dr. Sanchi Malhotra, a specialist in pediatric infectious diseases in UCLA Health, said that she shows colleagues from photos of subtle differences in measles rashes in various shades of skin.

These efforts seemed even more urgent, because two people from the Odra went through the international airport in Los Angeles, said Dr. Ishminder Kaur, a doctor of pediatric infectious diseases at the UCLA Mattel children’s hospital.

“We want to teach all possible now,” she said, “before someone misses the patient, and then finally brings him to an ambulance full of other patients with reduced immunity.”