https://archive.md/rxh4R
"He was a chiropractor by training, but in a remote part of West Texas with
limited medical care, Kiley Timmons had become a first stop for whatever hurt.
Ear infections. Labor pains. Oil workers who arrived with broken ribs and
farmers with bulging discs. For more than a decade, Kiley, 48, had seen 20
patients each day at his small clinic located between a church and a gas
station in Brownfield, population 8,500. He treated what he could, referred
others to physicians and prayed over the rest.
It wasn’t until early this spring that he started to notice something
unfamiliar coming through the door: aches that lingered, fevers that wouldn’t
break, discolored patches of skin that didn’t make sense. At first, he blamed
it on a bad flu season, but the symptoms stuck around and then multiplied. By
late March, a third of his patients were telling him about relatives who
couldn’t breathe. And then Kiley started coughing, too.
His wife, Carrollyn, had recently tested positive for Covid, but her symptoms
eased as Kiley’s intensified. He went to a doctor at the beginning of April for
a viral panel, but every result came back negative. The doctor decided to test
for the remote possibility of measles, since there was a large outbreak
spreading through a Mennonite community 40 miles away, but Kiley was
vaccinated.
“I feel like I’m dying,” Kiley texted a friend. He couldn’t hold down food or
water. He had already lost 10 pounds. His chest went numb, and his arms began
to tingle. His oxygen was dropping dangerously low when he finally got the
results.
“Positive for measles,” he wrote to his sister, in mid-April. “Just miserable.
I can’t believe this.”
Twenty-five years after measles was officially declared eliminated from the
United States, this spring marked a harrowing time of rediscovery. A cluster of
cases that began at a Mennonite church in West Texas expanded into one of the
largest outbreaks in a generation, spreading through communities with declining
vaccination rates as three people died and dozens more were hospitalized from
Mexico to North Dakota. Public health officials tracked about 1,200 confirmed
cases and countless exposures across more than 30 states. People who were
contagious with measles boarded domestic flights, shopped at Walmart, played
tuba in a town parade and toured the Mall of America.
But what frightened Kiley more than the potential spread was the severity of
the disease: About one in five unvaccinated people with measles will be
hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As
many as one in 20 children contracts a secondary pneumonia infection. More than
one in 1,000 dies. Measles stops spreading when 95 percent of a community is
immune, but national vaccination rates for children have fallen to less than 92
percent. In parts of West Texas, they’ve dropped below 80."
From
<
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/22/us/i-feel-like-ive-been-lied-to-when-a-measles-outbreak-hits-home.html?unlocked_article_code=1.RE8.H7I4.CG74WRO6EuMW>
Via Brad Koehn and Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
