Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
The headstone had not yet been placed Thursday on the freshly dug grave where a 20-year-old Amish woman was buried this week amid the rolling clover fields and dairy farms at the edge of suburban Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
Newly wed, and receiving treatment for blood cancer, she was the last of nine siblings sickened when measles swept through<\/a> her unvaccinated family\u2019s home on a one-lane road in Lancaster County.<\/p>\n At first, the home remedies that eased their symptoms seemed to help her, too: Soothing the fever with bath soaks. Calming the rash with coconut or olive oil. Cloistering in a dark room to ease light sensitivity.<\/p>\n Then her fever spiked. She struggled to breathe and had to sleep sitting up in a recliner in the living room, her maternal grandmother recalled.<\/p>\n Her family does not operate cars, in keeping with Amish beliefs, so they hired a driver to take her to the emergency department at Hershey Medical Center about an hour away. She died about two weeks later in the intensive care unit there, her grandmother said. <\/p>\n Speaking on the porch of her stone farmhouse, the grandmother described the family\u2019s experience with Pennsylvania\u2019s largest measles outbreak<\/a> in three decades, now the nation\u2019s largest. At her request, The Inquirer withheld her name and that of her deceased granddaughter to protect the family\u2019s privacy.<\/p>\n She said her granddaughter ultimately developed double pneumonia and died after the family decided to discontinue use of a ventilator. <\/p>\n The cancer made her especially vulnerable to a virus as contagious as measles, which will infect 9 in 10 unvaccinated people who are exposed.<\/p>\n \u201cHer immune system wasn\u2019t built up,\u201d the grandmother said. \u201cShe just couldn\u2019t take it with the measles.\u201d<\/p>\n Pennsylvania reported on Wednesday its fifth measles-related death<\/a>, revealing only that the latest fatality was an unvaccinated Lancaster County resident. Health officials did not provide further details, citing privacy laws. <\/p>\n But it appears from the grandmother\u2019s account, along with other records and news reports, that three of the five deaths occurred in adults with measles. Other reported deaths included an 18-year-old Amish woman from Mifflin County and a 40-year-old from Jefferson County with severe respiratory conditions. Two Amish infants in Lancaster County who had confirmed measles cases also died. All five cases involved people who were unvaccinated, either by choice or because they were too young to receive vaccines.<\/p>\n The number of deaths in adults is striking, said Paul Offit, who heads the Vaccine Education Center at the Children\u2019s Hospital of Philadelphia. Widespread childhood vaccinations had eradicated the disease in the United States, leaving mostly children too young to be vaccinated at high risk in recent decades. Now multiple generations of unvaccinated children<\/a> are adults, exposing wider vulnerabilities across the state, Offit said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re aging out a population that was never vaccinated,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n After learning the details of the 20-year-old\u2019s death from The Inquirer, Offit explained that measles commonly leads to pneumonia.<\/p>\n \u201cThe measles virus reproduces itself in the lungs and can cause severe and occasionally fatal infection,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Too late to get vaccinated<\/p>\n The young woman, the second oldest in a line of nine siblings, ages 6 to 22, feared getting measles in the outbreak in Lancaster County, her grandmother said.<\/p>\n About two years ago, she was diagnosed with leukemia, a blood cancer, and began medical treatment with the help of an \u201cEnglish\u201d neighbor \u2014 as Amish call outsiders \u2014 to drive her to her medical appointments.<\/p>\n The treatment regimen of chemo and steroids further weakened her immune system. She knew she was at risk of more severe sickness from a viral infection like measles, which started spreading throughout her family in the late summer.<\/p>\n Her eight siblings, her parents, and her new husband all got sick, the grandmother said.<\/p>\n Along with home remedies, family members drank extra fluids to stay hydrated, the grandmother said.<\/p>\n