Health officials are warning there’s a strong likelihood measles is spreading in the community after four cases, including two children, were confirmed this week.<\/p>\n
Two cases are in Manawat\u016b, one in Nelson and one in Auckland that was linked to overseas travel.<\/p>\n
Health NZ’s public health medicine specialist Dr Sharon Sime, said there was potential for other cases and officials were investigating locations of interest.<\/p>\n
She said there was a risk of measles outbreaks if it was spreading in the community.\u202f<\/p>\n
Sime told\u00a0Morning Report, she was “very worried” about the spread.<\/p>\n
This week’s cases were unrelated to a previous outbreak in Northland and a single case in Queenstown last month.<\/p>\n
“Three of these cases are not linked to overseas travel, which means there is a very strong likelihood of undetected cases in the community,” Sime said.<\/p>\n
“What it means is there was at least one infectious case that has infected out three cases which could have spread it to others in the community.”<\/p>\n
Sime said one of the infected children was school-aged, and it was expected any locations of interest would be published as soon as possible on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The disease is highly contagious and can cause serious and potentially long-term health problems.<\/p>\n
Simes warned the public to be vigilant for symptoms of measles including a cough, runny nose, high fever and red, sore eyes.<\/p>\n
During the last measles epidemic, in 2019, about one in three people needed hospital care.<\/p>\n
Sime said the disease could affect a person’s immune system for months or even years afterwards.<\/p>\n
The best prevention was getting vaccinated,\u00a0she said.<\/p>\n
“It’s very preventable through vaccination. Our vaccination rates are too low, we need to be at 95 percent to stop measles spreading.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health officials are warning there’s a strong likelihood measles is spreading in the community after four cases, including…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94404,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-94403","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94403"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94403\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}