The traveller became Michigan’s Patient Zero, after meeting hundreds of people in homes, synagogues and markets
Last month, a traveller raising money for charity in Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community drove through the night to Detroit — his next fundraising stop. He felt sick en route and saw a doctor when he got there. But the doctor, who had never seen measles, misdiagnosed the man’s fever and cough as bronchitis.
In the current outbreak, the New York contagion has spread through Patient Zero and other travellers to predominantly ultra-Orthodox communities in Westchester and Rockland Counties in New York; Oakland County in Michigan, and Baltimore County in Maryland. On Friday, Connecticut officials said an adult contracted measles while visiting Brooklyn in late March. New Jersey officials are investigating possible links between 11 cases in the Ocean County area and those in New York.
The traveller had come from Israel last November to Brooklyn, the epicentre of a measles outbreak, and stayed for about two months before going on to the Detroit area in early March, said Russell Faust, Oakland County’s medical officer. The man, whom Michigan health officials are not identifying, told them he was visiting ultra-Orthodox communities in the United States to raise money for charity.
The traveller, as it turned out, had had hundreds of contacts with community members that health officials needed to trace. He had stayed mostly in private homes in the areas of Oak Park and Southfield. He had visited synagogues three times a day to pray and study and frequented kosher markets and pizza parlours, among 30 locations in one week.
To get information out to the ultra-Orthodox community, health officials used its internal messaging system known as a calling post. Recorded voice messages ring on about 1,200 mobile phones. McGraw recorded a message that rabbinical leaders approved for delivery, the first of several that provided information about the disease and vaccination clinics.
The Hatzalah and rabbinical leaders helped the health department set up three clinics at one synagogue, immunizing nearly 1,000 people in one week. As of early April, health officials have given more than 2,100 vaccinations. Vaccine refusal does not appear to be a major factor in the Oakland County cluster, officials said.
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