12 Monkeys was a sci-fi thriller staring Bruce Willis where an apocalyptic plague was intentionally seeded by terrorists at an airport. Virginia health officials are warning that people passing through Dulles or Reagan may have been exposed to measles.
If you were at Dulles International Airport or Reagan Washington National Airport early this month, you may have been exposed to someone with measles.
A person who had measles after returning from international travel was in both airports on two dates, Virginia Department of Health officials said Saturday. The exposure is linked to two locations and times :
- Dulles, main terminal international arrivals area, Jan. 3, 4 to 8 p.m.
- Reagan Washington, Terminal A, Jan. 4, 2:30 to 6:30 p.m.
It is not just travelers who are getting exposed.
Measles are serious. They cause enough issues on their own, but their complications can be debilitating or fatal. Now we have learned more about this virus from the time that many of us may have had it as children prior to the MMR vaccine. Here is a snip from a British podcast on measles.
Most people have heard of the ‘R value.’ This is the number of people that each infectious case of a disease causes, how many people you give your illness to. And for flu and for COVID, it’s 2 or 3. For measles, that number is 20. So it’s extremely infectious, which means it spreads incredibly rapidly when you get a case of this. It has a short incubation period of a week or two, and people begin to feel unwell about a week before they get the rash. And they have this bright florid red rash all over their body for up to a week. And then they get better. And the problem with measles is that not only is it a really nasty infection when you have it - very high fevers, sore eyes, bad cough, and in some instances it also causes inflammation of the nervous system up to years later. But the damage doesn’t stop there because it also has this bizarre effect of wiping clean your immune slate. It basically introduces immune amnesia.
You can either read the whole transcript or listen to the segment at this link.
Measles outbreaks, and terrorist chatbots | Podcasts