Struggling to contain a raging measles epidemic in West Texas, public health officials increasingly worry that residents are relying on unproven remedies endorsed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and postponing doctor visits until the illness has worsened.
Hospitals and officials sounded an alarm this week, issuing a notice explaining which measles symptoms warranted immediate medical attention and stressing the importance of timely treatment.
“I’m worried we have kids and parents that are taking all of these other medications and then delaying care,” said Katherine Wells, director of public health in Lubbock, Texas, where many of the sickest children in this outbreak have been hospitalized.
Some seriously ill children had been given alternative remedies like cod liver oil, she added. “If they’re so, so sick and have low oxygen levels, they should have been in the hospital a day or two earlier,” she said.
The growing outbreak has spread to nearly 260 people in Texas. So far, 34 patients have been hospitalized, and one child has died. In neighboring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 35 and hospitalized two. Two cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.
Texas health officials believe the true number of cases is far higher. In all, there have been 301 measles cases in the United States this year, the highest number since 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Friday.
In his first public statements about the outbreak, Mr. Kennedy faced intense backlash for minimizing the situation, saying it was “not unusual” and falsely claiming that many people hospitalized were there “mainly for quarantine.”
In the following weeks, Mr. Kennedy altered his approach, offering a muted recommendation of vaccines for people in West Texas while also promoting unproven treatments like cod liver oil, which has vitamin A, and touting “almost miraculous and instantaneous” recoveries with steroids or antibiotics.
There is no such cure for measles, only medications to help manage the symptoms. Vaccination is the most effective way to prevent the infection.
While doctors will sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to help manage severe cases of measles, there is no credible evidence that supplements are effective for treating or preventing measles.
Experts also noted that antibiotics, which fight bacterial infections, may be used to treat secondary infections but do not stop measles itself, which is a virus.
In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the measles outbreak, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the area’s large Mennonite community, where most of the measles cases have been clustered, avoid interacting with the medical system and hold to a long tradition of natural remedies.
In the last few weeks, drugstores in West Texas have struggled to keep bottles of vitamin A pills and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves.
And this week, doctors at Seminole Memorial Hospital, which sits at the center of Gaines County, noticed that the number of patients coming in for measles symptoms suddenly dropped. Those who did show up were sicker than patients seen in previous weeks.
Even while cases in the community increased, Dr. Leila Myrick, a physician at the hospital, said she performed half the number of measles tests, compared with those the week before.
She worried that her patients were instead going less than a mile away from the hospital to a pop-up clinic, where a doctor from a neighboring city had been doling out alternative remedies, like cod liver oil and vitamin C.
The physician, Dr. Ben Edwards, is well known in the area for producing podcasts that often discuss the dangers of vaccines, and for his wellness clinic in Lubbock, which rejects central tenets of medicine, like the idea that germs cause certain diseases.
In an interview with Fox News, Mr. Kennedy said he had spoken with Dr. Edwards (whom he mistakenly called Dr. Ed Benjamin) and learned “what is working on the ground.”
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