SALT LAKE CITY — The three recently confirmed cases of measles in Utah have doctors concerned about the potential for wider spread as vaccination rates decline.
"Monday morning, I started at 7, two messages right off the bat, 'Can I come in and get my child their vaccine?'" said Dr. Ellie Brownstein with the Utah Chapter American Academy of Pediatrics.
Health officials have confirmed that all three cases — two in Utah County and one in Southwest Utah — involved individuals who were unvaccinated.
"People have not seen what measles can do because we've had such an effective vaccine, where suddenly the potential side effects for the vaccine becomes more concerning than the illness… we forget that as many as one in five kids with measles would get hospitalized," Brownstein said.
The doctor says knowing what they know about measles should allow them to be better prepared when it comes to preventing the spread.
"We're not as well prepared as we should be because we have let that lax, and we have become complacent in the fact that we don't see this as an illness," Brownstein explained.
WATCH: All 3 confirmed measles cases in Utah were unvaccinated
At the University of Utah, Dr. Andrew Pavia has dedicated his whole career to studying infectious diseases and says they've learned a lot over the past several decades.
"Prevention is our number one goal and yet of course, nature keeps changing, things come up; COVID, HIV, West Nile, all of these new diseases but when we get way ahead of diseases like measles and make a huge impact and we're no longer seeing kids get really sick and injured by measles and then it comes back," Pavia said. "It's disappointing, shocking, and kind of painful because this isn't a fluke of nature, this is a problem that we brought on ourselves."
He says a drop in vaccination rates has driven the reemergence of measles.
Like Brownstein, Pavia shared that, unlike COVID and other new infectious diseases, health officials know what measles looks like and know how to prevent it.
And while three cases of measles in Utah may not seem like a lot, Pavia says it means that it's started to circulate.
"It hasn't really reached kids yet, but when it reaches something like a summer camp or summer school, the potential for spread among kids are really high," he warned. "It may not be an emergency that we have three cases, but it's a warning shot that we're going to see more spread."
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