CHICAGO (NEWSnet/AP) — Seven people living at a shelter for migrants are among eight people in the Chicago area who are reported to have contracted measles since last week.

The Chicago Department of Public Health said this cluster is the first instance of measles reported locally since 2019.

The health situation prompted the arrival of a team with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to guide response among local and state officials to the quickly spreading infections.

The situation is highly unusual as measles “was declared eliminated from the United States” in 2000, the CDC said. Years of vaccinations, currently administered through the two-dose “MMR” vaccination for children, helped curbed the spread. With that, cases in the US. tend to originate from travel abroad such as Americans who have not been vaccinated.

To put even eight cases at once into perspective: there have been 45 cases of measles confirmed in the US. since Jan. 1. And there were 38 cases in the entire country during all of 2023.

Chicago’s first recent case — an adult — was not a shelter resident.

But it quickly caught on within that population. The first shelter resident known to have measles was diagnosed on Friday; the others quickly followed including three confirmed Tuesday. The department said those infected at the shelter include 4 children and 3 adults.

In response, nearly 900 people have received vaccines since Thursday night, officials said.

Measles is considered dangerous for babies and young children. Symptoms of the highly contagious disease include cough, high fever, watery eyes and a widespread rash of red spots all over the skin. The CDC says on average, nearly 1 in 5 unvaccinated people in the United States who get measles need to be hospitalized.

“We haven’t seen cases of new arrivals coming with measles,” the city’s public health Commissioner Dr. Olusimbo Ige said Wednesday. “Measles cases were acquired here. And so, we have been working very hard, taking our responsibility to safeguard the health of the new arrivals seriously.”

The cluster within the city-run shelter highlighted Chicago’s struggle to respond to the arrival of nearly 37,000 migrants since 2022 when Texas Gov. Greg Abbot started sending newly arrived migrants to other major cities. On Tuesday, a city dashboard showed more than 11,000 people remain in city-run shelters.

Providing medical care is part of that effort; from vaccinations to treatment of conditions developed during exhausting journeys to reach the U.S. border with Mexico. Many of the migrants who recently arrived in Chicago are originally from Venezuela, which has one of the world’s lowest vaccination rates for children.

Follow NEWSnet on Facebook and X platform to get our headlines in your social feeds.

Copyright 2024 NEWSnet and The Associated Press. All rights reserved.