SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
How do you count a measles death? That question has become a point of controversy. In Pennsylvania, officials have reported five measles-associated deaths in recent weeks. But so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged just two deaths. NPR health correspondent Maria Godoy is here to break it down. Hi, Maria.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Hi. How are you?
PFEIFFER: Good. So we have a mismatch. Why does the CDC's official measles death count not match what Pennsylvania officials are reporting?
GODOY: Well, last month, the CDC announced it was changing how it counts measles deaths. Historically, the CDC used to rely on reports from state health departments. And you want that rapid notification in an outbreak situation to respond rapidly. Now, however, the CDC is looking to official death records confirmed by the National Center for Health Statistics. But that system is slower. And it's designed for more long-term, retrospective data gathering on deaths. And, you know, this change happened after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly questioned the Pennsylvania deaths, suggesting that measles might not have been the cause of death. And Kennedy is a long-term vaccine skeptic, which has led critics to accuse the CDC of making the change for political reasons, to downplay the severity of measles.
PFEIFFER: So that accusation that politics is distorting health data, how has the CDC responded to that?
GODOY: Well, a couple weeks ago, the new CDC director, Dr. Erica Schwartz, gave an interview to a local news station, Atlanta News First. And in it, she denied that the death count data was being changed for political reasons. She said the U.S. lacked a standardized definition for measles-related death. And she drew a comparison to arguments over how COVID deaths were counted early in the pandemic.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ERICA SCHWARTZ: If someone got hit by a bus and they happened to have COVID, often that was called a COVID-related death.
GODOY: Now, many public health experts would dispute that analogy. But even those who accept that some COVID deaths might have been overcounted early in the pandemic, say, that is highly unlikely to happen when it comes to measles.
PFEIFFER: And why? What would make measles different?
GODOY: Yeah, you know, I spoke to Dr. Jake Scott. He's an infectious disease specialist with Stanford University. And he says there are really two key differences between COVID and measles, prevalence and screening. He says, in early 2022, the U.S. was reporting hundreds of thousands of cases of COVID each day. And many hospitals were routinely screening everyone for COVID to protect vulnerable patients. By contrast, even though the U.S. is seeing a measles resurgence, it's still around 4,000 cases for the entire year.
JAKE SCOTT: No hospital screens every single patient being admitted for measles. That would be ridiculous. And so if someone's being tested for measles, there's a clinical suspicion that that person may have measles.
GODOY: So in other words, you're not going to have measles as an incidental finding. It's not likely. He says the measles virus itself can cause damage, but it also weakens your immune system, so you're vulnerable to other infections. So, for example, if a person's immediate cause of death is pneumonia, but they had measles, he says measles is still likely the underlying cause of death. In other words, if measles shows up on a death certificate, he says, it almost certainly played a role.
PFEIFFER: All right. So we obviously want accurate health data. We also want trust in our public agencies. Where do we go from here?
GODOY: Yeah, the CDC is working with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists to create a standardized definition of measles deaths that can be used across the U.S. that's expected to be ready in the next two to three months. In the meantime, we might continue to hear discrepancies between what the states report and what the CDC has to say.
PFEIFFER: That is NPR's Maria Godoy. Maria, thank you.
GODOY: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
