There Is No Connection Between Measles Infections and Immigrants in the United States

Alex Nowrasteh andAndrew C. ForresterEarlier this week, we published a  post on how there was no relationship between the spread of notifiable diseases in the United States and immigrant populations. Prior to the COVID-19 crisis,several commentators were concerned that immigrants – especially illegal immigrants – were spreading serious diseases like measles. This is a follow up post focusing on measles specifically, which is one notifiable disease. A legitimate role of immigration policy is to limit the international spread of contagious diseases like measles. However, it’s also important to note the extent of this problem by showing that immigrants do not threaten a measles outbreak.MethodsLike our earlierpost, here we test correlation between the incidence ofmeasles and state ‐​level immigrant population shares for the 2010–2018 period. We use annual, state‐​level measles data from the CDC’sNational Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS), which reports the number of nationallynotifiable infectious diseases and conditions by state and year. A  notifiable disease is one where the CDCstates that “regular, frequent, and timely information regarding individual cases is considered necessary for the prevention and control of the disease.” In addition to other vaccinations, theU.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requires a  vaccination against measles to legally immigrate to the United States. Foreign ‐​born population data at the stat...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs