There is currently a measles outbreak in Minnesota. This was, unfortunately, entirely predictable – not, of course, that an outbreak would occur specifically in Minnesota, but that we would start to see outbreaks in communities with low vaccination rates.
So far Minnesota has seen 73 cases of measles. This is more than any year in the last 20 years (or more, that is how far back the tables go). In fact, that is more than all Minnesota cases combined in the last 20 year (56).
Nationwide we hit our low point for measles in 2004 with only 37 cases, all imported from other countries. This means that measles we eliminated from the US, with no native reservoir and no endemic cases. Measles, of course, has not been eradicated from the world and so we can still have imported cases. Thirty seven cases is down from the millions that would occur each year prior to the introduction of vaccines. The graph shows reported cases, which were as high as 800 thousand, but the CDC estimates that the real number was much higher as most cases went unreported.
There is no mystery what is going on – the modern anti-vaccine movement has been effective in spreading false fear about vaccines. Since 2004 the number of measles cases has been climbing. The recent peak was in 2014 with 667 cases, due largely to the Disney outbreak.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/minnesota-measles/