Struggling to contain a stormy measles epidemic in western Texas, public health officials are increasingly worried that residents remedy un shipied remedies approved by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and that postpone medical visits until the disease has worsened.
Hospitals and officials played an alarm this week, issuing a notice that explains which measles symptoms immediately guaranteed medical care and underlining the importance of timely treatment.
“I am worried that we have children and parents who are taking all these other drugs and then delaying care, “said Katherine Wells, director of the public health of Lubbock, in Texas, where many of the most sick children in this outbreak have been hospitalized.
Some seriously sick children had received alternative remedies such as cod liver oil, he added. “If they are like that, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital one day or two before,” he said.
The growing outbreak has spread to almost 260 People in Texas. So far, 34 patients have been hospitalized and a child is dead. In the nearby counties of New Mexico, the virus has ill 35 and hospitalized two. Two cases in Oklahoma were also connected to the outbreak.
Texas health officials believe that the real number of cases is much higher. Overall, there have been 301 cases of measles in the United States this year, the highest number since 2019, the centers for the control and prevention of diseases shown on Friday.
In his first public statements on the epidemic, Kennedy faced an intense repercussions to minimize the situation, saying that he was not “unusual” and mistakenly claiming that many hospitalized people were there “mainly for quarantine”.
In the following weeks, Kennedy has changed its approach, offering a mitigating confusion of vaccines for people in western Texas, also promoting un shunk treatments such as cod liver oil, which has vitamin A, and advertising “almost miraculous and instantaneous” with steroids or antibiotics.
There is no such cure for measles, only drugs to help manage symptoms. Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent infection.
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in hospital to help manage serious cases of measles, there is no credible evidence that the supplements are effective for the treatment or prevention of measles.
Experts have also noticed that antibiotics, who fight bacterial infections, can be used to treat secondary infections but do not stop the measles itself, which is a virus.
In the county of Gaines, in Texas, the epicenter of the measles epidemic, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the large Mennonita community of the area, where most cases of measles have been grouped, avoid interacting with the medical system and hold a long tradition of natural remedies.
In recent weeks, pharmacies in western Texas have struggled to maintain bottles of vitamin A pills and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves.
And this week, the doctors of the Seminole Memorial Hospital, which is located in the center of the county of Gaines, have noticed that the number of patients who came for the symptoms of measles has suddenly decreased. Those who presented themselves were more sick than patients seen in the previous weeks.
Even if the cases in the community have increased, Dr. Leila Myrick, a doctor in the hospital, said he had performed half of the measles test number, compared to those of the previous week.
He worried that his patients were instead less than a mile away from the hospital at a pop-up clinic, where a doctor from a nearby city had distributed alternative remedies, such as cod liver oil and vitamin C.
The doctor, Dr. Ben Edwards, is well known in the area for the production of podcasts that often discuss the dangers of vaccines and for his well -being clinic in Lubbock, which refuses the central principles of medicine, such as the idea that germs cause certain diseases.
In an interview with Fox News, Kennedy said he spoke to Dr. Edwards (who erroneously called Dr. and Benjamin) and learned “What is working on the ground”.
In an e -mail transmitted through an employee, dr. Edwards confirmed that he spoke to Mr. Kennedy for about 15 minutes in what he described as a call of “information collection”. Dr. Edwards refused to speak directly with the New York Times.
In the following days, hundreds of people from the Mennonita community rose in the fortune clinic of Dr. Edwards, who held a food shop for local health, said Tina Siemens, who contributed to organizing the event.
Mrs. Siemens said that people looking for active measles infections and those who hoped to prevent one from being present.
To obtain enough supplements for the clinic, Dr. Edwards had enrolled one of his patients, a pilot, to fly to Scottsdale, Arizona, and collected almost a thousand bottles of vitamin C supplements and cod liver oil, both as a lemon and soft flavored drinks without flavor without flavor, said an owner of the supplements company, Patrick Sullivan.
“How much do you have in stock and how quickly could you bring it to me?” Mr. Sullivan recalled Dr. Edwards.
The treatments were free, said Mrs. Siemens. The members of the defense of children’s health, a non-profit non-profit organization that Kennedy helped to found before becoming a secretary of health, created an online donation page that has collected over $ 16,000 to help cover the cost of “vitamins, supplements and essential medicines”.
Morbillo symptoms often resolve themselves within a few weeks. But in rare cases, the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, put oxygen in their lungs. There may also be a swelling of the brain, which can cause lasting problems, such as blindness, deafness and intellectual disability. Both complications can be fatal.
During this outbreak, the children hospitalized with pneumonia had to be intubated, said Mrs. Wells, director of Lubbock’s healthcare. In such circumstances, timely care can mean the difference between life and death.
The remedies not demonstrated for decades have made more fatal measles outbreaks, said Patsy Stinchfield, immediate president of the National Foundation for infectious diseases.
He worked as a nurse in a minnesota hospital during a burst of measles in 1989 who killed several children. Two of them arrived at his hospital in critical condition after their parents had treated at home with Traditional healing therapies.
“They keep their baby at home too long and try these home remedies,” he said. “They went directly from the emergency room in the intensive care unit and died. “