Pandemic Center

Experts say that the Trump administration has failed to take obvious steps to contain the spread of measles, which is continuing to accelerate in the United States as the number of cases has climbed past 1,000.

The administration has revealed a relaxed attitude toward the highly contagious virus both in terms of messaging and funding allocation, experts said.
---

Beginning fall 2026, in-person master’s students in the School of Public Health will matriculate under a newly designed curriculum that has been structured to provide greater flexibility.

The goal is for students to graduate equipped with more hands-on skills and greater knowledge of how to apply their education to their chosen professions, said Associate Director of the Accelerated Master of Public Health Program and Associate Dean for Education in the SPH Scott Rivkees, who spearheaded the curriculum’s restructure.

---

As measles cases continue to rise, the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status.

According to a spokesperson from the Pan American Health Organization, which will oversee the review of the United State’s measles elimination status on April 13, the “reestablishment of endemic transmission would be defined as a continuous chain of transmission lasting through or beyond” Jan. 20.

The Herald spoke to experts at Brown to better understand measles, its potential threats and the possibility of the United States losing its elimination status.

---

Scott Rivkees still remembers two cases from his first week as a pediatric intern at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1982.

The first was a patient with chickenpox or varicella encephalitis, a virus that causes brain inflammation. The second was a child with bacterial meningitis, a severe infection that causes inflammation of the membranes around the brain and spinal cord. The infection can produce seizures and deafness and lead to death.

The four governments of the United Kingdom responded during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they did “too little, too late,” to effectively stop the virus from spreading during a critical moment in time, according to a national inquiry published this week.

“This lack of urgency and the huge rise in infections made a mandatory lockdown inevitable,” the inquiry report explained. “It should have been introduced one week earlier. Modelling shows that in England alone there would have been approximately 23,000 fewer deaths in the first wave up until 1 July 2020.”

---

Florida State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo announced that The Sunshine State will become the first in the nation to remove the mandatory vaccination mandate for schoolchildren. That means that by the end of 2025, kids entering public school will no longer be required to have vaccinations for contagious diseases such as Chicken Pox, Hepatitis B among others. While Dr. Ladapo says the decision will ultimately give power back to individuals are parents to decide what they put in their children’s bodies, other medial professional disagree with the decision and say a health crisis could be looming. Former Florida Surgeon General and Professor of Education at Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Scott Rivkees, sat with us to talk about the ramifications that could come, not just with kids, but with public health as well.

WGCU is your trusted source for news and information in Southwest Florida. We are a nonprofit public service, and your support is more critical than ever. Keep public media strong and donate now. Thank you.