200+ students & staff in 2 California universities put under quarantine amid measles scare
The measles outbreak is feared to have spread to California State University (CSU) and UCLA after two students contracted measles, potentially exposing over 200 students and staff to the disease.
UCLA said that 117 of its students and staff have been ordered to stay home after they failed to provide medical records proving that they had been vaccinated. The university’s authorities raised the alarm over a potential outbreak of the highly infectious disease on its campuses after it was discovered that one of the students was contagious when going to classes early April.
Also on rt.com Measles outbreak set to smash 10-year yearly record in first months of 2019It was determined that 500 people might have been exposed to the disease while the student was roaming the campuses unaware of the condition. However, most of them have already been cleared after submitting their vaccination records.
CSU, a sprawling public university with 23 campuses, has enforced similar guidelines in a bid to mitigate the risk of its thousands of students and staff catching measles. A person who contracted the disease visited the university library on April 11.
Subsequently, the university ordered 71 student employees and 127 staff employees to hunker down at home and minimize their contacts with the outside word. At present, there is no risk of contracting measles at the library, CSU said in a statement.
L.A. County, where the schools are located, has so far registered only five cases, two of them students. California health officials announced Thursday that a total of 38 measles cases have been reported in the state. While it is almost a two-fold increase since the previous week, the number pales in comparison with the tree-digit figures from New York state.
As of Wednesday, there were 390 confirmed measles cases just in Brooklyn and Queens, mainly in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities where parents are reluctant to immunize their children because of religious beliefs.
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