PORT ANGELES — It’s not over till it’s over, but for now, at least, it’s over.
It’s measles, of course.
The Clallam County Board of Health on Tuesday officially ended the public health emergency it declared Feb. 17, about two weeks after the first in a string of five measles cases surfaced in Port Angeles.
No cases were confirmed elsewhere in the county or in neighboring Jefferson County.
As of Sunday, the interval of two full 21-day periods of contagion had passed since the final case was diagnosed.
That’s the time that must expire before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers a measles outbreak to have run its course.
Measles-free
Before it was over, said Dr. Jeanette Stehr-Green, interim county health officer, employees of Clallam County Health and Human Services had contacted 257 people who’d had possible measles exposure, conducted 30 no-cost vaccination clinics and given some 500 shots of the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (MMRV) vaccine.
“We are officially measles-free,” she told health commissioners at their regular monthly meeting.
“For now,” chimed in Christina Hurst, public health program director.
Hurst’s point was that, had more people been immunized before the outbreak, the disease might not have hit its first victim, a 52-year-old Port Angeles man diagnosed and hospitalized Feb. 1 at Olympic Medical Center.
He passed on the disease to a 5-year-old girl, who, besides infecting her 14-year-old sibling, sparked a quarantine of several students at Olympic Christian School.
Later, two other men were diagnosed with measles, one of whom had received a less-effective vaccine that last was given 44 years ago.
All recovered
All the people who had measles have recovered.
According to records from the state Department of Health, 12.5 percent of Port Townsend schoolchildren, 10.3 percent of Chimacum children and 9.9 percent of Crescent students were exempted by their parents or guardians — nearly all for philosophical reasons — from MMR immunizations.
The CDC says 90 percent immunization is needed to prevent an epidemic of a communicable disease.
Despite the outbreak, a bill sponsored by 24th District state Rep. Steve Tharinger that would have closed the exemption to all except religious or medical reasons failed to pass the state House of Representatives.
Similar bills had similar deaths in Oregon and California — where measles first surfaced nationally with an outbreak traced to a visitor to Disneyland in December.
California health authorities declared their measles outbreak over last Friday, according to The Associated Press.
National attention
Clallam County received widespread attention during its response to the outbreak, Stehr-Green said.
“The whole nation watched us,” she said.
Stehr-Green called it “an amazing journey” — amazing that measles struck Clallam County with a strain that investigators said was common to Asia and the Philippines but amazing, too, that the highly infectious viral disease spread to only five people.
Stehr-Green said the public expense of the outbreak in terms of the no-cost immunizations, health workers’ overtime to administer them and the work that was postponed during the crisis had yet to be counted.
Peninsula Children’s Clinic, OMC and private physicians also played key roles in controlling the outbreak, she said.
“We will continue to analyze what went on, what lessons we’ve learned, what happened and what should have happened,” she said.
“We will be doing an analysis of the cost of this, which has been significant.”
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
