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Comment by NeoBasilisk | Hacker News Reader

That is true. What I meant to say is that any real threat of getting the disease in the US was eradicated.

"...Measles was declared eliminated (absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months) from the United States in 2000. ..."

Measles History from the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/about/history.html

This is some shady definition. There were outbreaks in 1999, so really what does "eliminated" mean? To me it has never been "eliminated".

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4925a1.htm

The CDC page he linked to defines "eliminated", as does his comment: "absence of continuous disease transmission for greater than 12 months". You can have outbreaks of a disease that have been eliminated from a population: the disease can be reintroduced from some other population. But what you don't have is person-to-person transmission within the population.

If you're vaccinated any real threat of getting the disease in the U.S. is still eradicated. There've been 555 measles cases in the U.S. so far this year. It's unclear how many in the current outbreak were vaccinated (though in the one sub-outbreak that does have data, NY/Rockland, 3% of cases had 2 doses of MMR), but historically, only about 2-3% of cases in an outbreak are vaccinated:

https://vaxopedia.org/2019/02/14/vaccinated-vs-unvaccinated-...

That'd imply that maybe 10 vaccinated people have come down with measles in this 2019 outbreak, out of > 300M total vaccinated people. By contrast, about 51 people die every year in the U.S. from being struck by lightning.

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