Team: 1008
School: Gadsden Mid
Area of Science: Biology
Proposal: The problem is that Anti-Vaxers are causing measles to reoccur in the Brooklyn after years of being
eradicated in the United States.
Outbreak in Brooklyn, 2018-2019
As of September 3, 2019, 649 cases were confirmed in NYC between September 2018 and August 2019. Community transmission was declared over on September 3.
During the outbreak, 33,805 doses of the MMR vaccine were administered to people younger than 19 years old in Williamsburg and Borough Park.
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/measles.page
How Measles Spreads
Measles is very contagious. It is spread through the air when an infected person sneezes or coughs. A person will be contagious four days before the rash appears and for four days after the rash appears. They are no longer contagious on the fifth day after the rash started.
The virus can remain in the air for up to two hours.
Symptoms
Symptoms usually appear 10 to 12 days after exposure to the virus. In some cases, symptoms may start as early as seven days or as late as 21 days.
Early symptoms include: Fever, Cough, Runny nose, Red, watery eyes, Diarrhea, and Ear infections.
Three to five days after initial symptoms, a rash of red spots appears on the face that then spreads over the entire body.
Anyone can become infected with measles, but the virus is more severe in infants, pregnant women and people whose immune systems are weak. Complications of measles include:
• Diarrhea
• Ear infections
• Pneumonia (infection of the lungs)
• Encephalitis (swelling of the brain)
• Premature birth or low-birth-weight in pregnancy
• Death
Measles is a highly contagious virus that lives in the nose and throat mucus of an infected person. It can spread to others through coughing and sneezing. Also, measles virus can live for up to two hours in an airspace where the infected person coughed or sneezed.
What are the results and the purpose of this project?
First, we will research the number cases per 100,000 in Brooklyn. We will research the transmission rate of a measles outbreak based on different ratios of different vaccinated and non-vaccinated people. We do expect that the results of vaccination is beneficial.
Plan to Investigate in Program
We will use a ratio of 1,000 population. We will change the ratio of the number of vaccinated and non-vaccinated population to find the critical amount of anti-vaxers that could cause a big jump of the people exposed and contracting measles. We will run it with 900, vaccinated to 100 non-vaccinated, 800 vaccinated to 200 non-vaccinated, 700 vaccinated to 300 non-vaccinated,
Team Members:
Sponsoring Teacher: Danielle McFarland