You know things are slow in my world if I'm mentioning pestes des petits ruminants, aka goat plague, but it has been in the news lately and does have relevance to us. Spoiler alert, you don't need to break out the masks and gloves, the virus causing this disease has never been reported to infect humans.
First, let's touch on our (nearly) nonexistent summer respiratory infection season.
SRIS
We're talking primarily about covid and avian flu at the moment. Covid wastewater levels may be starting to level off, except in the southern US.
The clinical respiratory illness map is a beautiful sea of green (with a bit of light green in Alaska). I'm only showing this to remember fondly come next winter.
Not a lot to report on the avian flu front, with a continued sprinkling of new mild human illness in poultry/dairy workers and new outbreaks in flocks and herds. I was interested to see that CDC is making a $5 million investment to provide seasonal flu vaccine to at risk workers. Of course we want everyone eligible to vaccinate themselves against seasonal influenza, but the ulterior motive here is to lessen the chance that a human will be simultaneously infected with a seasonal flu strain along with the influenza A H5N1 avian strain. Such a situation could increase the likelihood of reassortment of the 2 strains to create a new virus that could cause more problems for us. This scenario is still a rare probability but worth preventive measures.
PPRV and Cousins
The virus that causes PPR is a morbillivirus, which should sound familiar to healthcare providers because that is the same genus as measles virus. You can learn more than you want to know about PPR from the article from which the figure below was lifted.
Morbilliviruses in general have the theoretical ability to be eradicated. In fact, one animal morbillivirus, rinderpest virus, already has been eradicated. PPR has been targeted for eradication by 2030, but a recent outbreak in Greece now threatens that with spread from Africa and the Middle East to the European Union. Infection has a very high fatality rate in goats, sheep, camels, and other ruminants that provide livelihoods to many. So, although PPRV doesn't infect humans, runinant infection is a major threat to livelihoods of those in these countries who depend on these animal industries. The World Organisation for Animal Health nicely summarizes eradication tools in place, let's hope the Greek outbreak doesn't set eradication plans back too far. (Also, if you're looking for a rabbit (only slight pun here) hole to fall down, check out WOAH's list of 207 animal diseases.)
The real reason I mention PPR is to draw attention to somewhat misleading measles pronouncements in the lay press this past week. NBC, among virtually every national news agency I could find, highlighted the CDC announcement that US measles cases have tripled this year compared to all of 2023. That's true but also misleading. I understand this helps get the message out that measles vaccination rates are low in many segments of society, but by using this relative increase in cases as a headline it overlooks the fact that the actual number of cases is still low, thank goodness. To its credit, the NBC link above did go on to give these details, but in our sound bite world that clarification is easily lost. Here's a bit more perspective from CDC.
From the same website, you can see how graphs can be used to stress a particular point - the perspective below would make us think everything is great. Just by expanding the date range, we can hardly see anything going on this year.
CDC regularly updates assessments of measles outbreak risk in the US. Currently they predict the most likely number of cases for 2024 will total 300, with a 4% risk of >1000 cases. Keep that in mind over the next 5 months.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for increasing measles vaccination rates; however, I don't want to do this without presenting an accurate view of the data. I'd make a terrible salesperson or politician.