Utah quietly navigated a measles scare last month after a symptomatic passenger landed at the Salt Lake City International Airport and traveled to Idaho the week before Memorial Day.
Summit County Nursing Director Derek Moss said a passenger traveling from Canada had an active measles case and landed in Salt Lake City on May 19. The passenger then drove to southern Idaho but seemingly did not make any stops along the route.
Days later, on May 23, the same individual drove back to Salt Lake City from Idaho and boarded another plane at the airport. The person has since been placed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Do Not Board” list, effectively prohibiting them from airline travel in the United States.
State health officials alerted Summit County Epidemiologist Nancy Porter of the situation, as well as other health departments across the state. Moss said there is no reason to believe the passenger interacted with anyone from Summit County at this time, however.
“The state has decided not to do a health advisory or any public notices at this time,” Moss told the Summit County Board of Health on Monday. “They determined at this point he was low-risk, and they didn’t want to cause chaos. That was the rationale.”
Moss said the state believes the individual was fully vaccinated, but one of the two doses the person received was not a vaccination approved in the United States.
“Idaho’s agreed to let us know of any suspect cases related to this individual so that we know what kind of concern we should have, and I haven’t heard anything since they left Utah,” he added.
Measles is a highly contagious illness with serious complications, especially for children under the age of 5, according to the CDC. Symptoms include a high fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes and rashes. It spreads through the air when an infected person coughs or sneezes, and the particles can remain in a room after the infected person leaves for up to two hours.
The best prevention method is the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, commonly known as an MMR vaccine. The CDC says two doses of the vaccine are approximately 97% effective when it comes to preventing measles while one dose is about 93% effective.
The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000, but outbreaks have recently become more common. The Associated Press reported last week that the CDC identified more than twice as many measles cases coming from outside of the U.S. compared to May of last year, mostly from unvaccinated American travelers returning to the country.
“In 2019, the U.S. saw 1,274 cases and almost lost its status of having eliminated measles,” the Associated Press added.
There are currently 1,088 confirmed measles cases in the United States. Texas has the highest number of cases with a total of 738, and two elementary school-aged children died in West Texas, which is considered the epicenter of the state’s outbreak, in April.
One infected adult in New Mexico also died of measles-related complications in March.
The two children and the adult were all unvaccinated, according to the Associated Press.
The highly contagious nature of measles makes airline travel during outbreaks especially dangerous. In a case similar to Utah’s scare last month, an infected out-of-state passenger traveled through the Denver International Airport in mid-May and subsequently infected six other people who were either on the same flight or inside the airport during the exposure period, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.