What you need to know about measles and vitamin A

The first thing the CDC said about the measles spread was that vitamin A could be used as a form of supportive care.

After more than a month of a major measles outbreak in western Texas that has sickened 146 people and killed one school-age child, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made their first public statement. In it, they talked about a therapy that has some infectious disease experts scratching their heads.

Measles lacks a specific antiviral treatment, and extra care like vitamin A may be beneficial. Dr. Lara Johnson, chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital, doesn’t confirm if vitamin A is being used.
“We can’t say anything specific about how our patients were cared for, but our doctors have followed the guidelines for treating people with measles,” Johnson said.

Vitamin A helps the body do many things, like keeping us healthy, seeing clearly, and growing. It has been used for years to treat severe measles in kids from poor countries, where vitamin deficiencies are common. It can lower the chance of complications and death in those situations, but it’s not thought to be a cure for the disease. This is also what the American Academy of Paediatrics and the World Health Organisation say kids who are hospitalised with measles should do.

“Almost all the studies have been done in resource-limited countries where it does seem to have a significant positive effect,” said Dr. Camille Sabella, director of paediatric infectious diseases at Cleveland Clinic Children’s. “And it has also been shown that children with lower levels of vitamin A tend to have more severe measles in those countries.” He also said that he was glad the CDC was supporting vitamin A.

The National Foundation for Infectious Diseases says that vitamin A is not used as much for measles cases in the U.S. The fact that most Americans get enough vitamin A from food may be one reason.

Dr. Alexandra Yonts, an infectious disease expert at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., said, “I think the big caveat is that there’s a much higher rate of vitamin A deficiency to all of this.” “It’s not as clear whether populations like those in the U.S. and other developed countries are better off or not.”

Dr. Bernard Camins, who is the medical head for infection prevention at New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, agrees that it’s not clear if vitamin A would work the same way in the U.S., but he says that giving it in the right amounts shouldn’t hurt anyone.

Camins said, “I don’t think it’s always dangerous to give it, since long as you give the right dose and use it in the right way.” “It’s just something that doctors will give to people who get measles to help them stay alive.”

He also said that vitamin A doesn’t work to stop measles.

He said, “What worries me most is what happened with Covid, when some people didn’t get the vaccine and instead took anti-parasitic drugs or something.”

Doctors worry a lot about getting that message wrong. Influencers and groups that are against vaccines, like the new Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have been pushing vitamin A as a way to prevent and treat measles for years. During outbreaks, anti-vaccine groups have held drives to raise money and send vitamin A to areas that need it.

Doctor David Higgins, a pediatrician and preventive medicine specialist, argues that the false belief that vitamin A can replace the MMR vaccine is untrue and calls for the CDC to clarify this.

Adding to the worry is the fact that too much vitamin A is harmful. As a fat-soluble vitamin, it is kept in the body and not passed out of it through urine. More builds up in organs like the liver the more you take.

“You can actually get too much vitamin A and be poisoned by it,” Yonts said, adding that she would only use it very rarely if she knew a patient was weak or very sick and in the hospital. Women who are pregnant and have measles but aren’t taking a multivitamin may also benefit from the vitamin.

The WHO, CDC, and AAP all say that people who have measles should only get the shot for two days and follow their specific dose instructions based on their age.

That’s why it’s only used in these rare cases for one or two doses and people don’t do what Yonts fears will happen in these communities: “Oh well, we’ll just go out there and start taking high doses of vitamin A every day to keep the measles away.” “Because you do store the vitamin in your body, this could actually make health problems worse for those kids.”

33 thoughts on “What you need to know about measles and vitamin A

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