This is Pedicast.

Welcome to Pediacast, a pediatric podcast for parents.

And now, direct from the campus of nationwide children's, here is your host, Dr. Mike.

Hello everyone, and welcome once again to PDACast.

It is a pediatric podcast for moms and dads.

This is Dr. Mike, coming to you from the campus of nationwide children's hospital.

We're in Columbus, Ohio.

It is episode 431 for May 1st, 2019.

We're calling this one What's Up with Measles and the MMR vaccine.

I want to welcome all of you to the program.

So unless you've been living under Iraq, you have heard the news that we have a problem with measles in the United States.

And this is a statement that I could not imagine saying when I started a PDACAST back in 2006,

which was just six years after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated from the United States.

So I never saw a case of measles in medical school, in residency, in private practice, just didn't see it.

And what the CDC, though, did not count on is the subsequent decline in vaccination rates that we have

seen in recent years, resulting from vaccine fears and vaccine hesitancy.

And that's resulted in a vulnerable population.

Now, combine that with easy travel from areas of the world where measles has not been eradicated,

and you have the perfect storm for an outbreak of disease, and that's exactly what we've seen.

Numbers of measles cases in the United States had hit a post-eradication high in 2014,

and that was the year we had 667 reported cases.

Many of them associated with an outbreak that saw Disneyland at the epicenter

...