US CDC staff to arrive in South Carolina to help contain measles outbreak

By Puyaan Singh and Mariam Sunny

March 4 (Reuters) – U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff will arrive in South Carolina to help the state contain the largest measles outbreak in the country in more than 30 years, a state official said in a briefing on Wednesday.

Three officers, also called disease detectives, from the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service are expected to arrive in the state next week to help analyze data collected during the outbreak, said Dr. Linda Bell, South Carolina’s epidemiologist.

Last week, Reuters reported a dozen public health experts — from the nonprofit CDC Foundation, an independent entity created by Congress to support the CDC — were arriving in South Carolina to help the state contain the outbreak.

The CDC generally provides scientists and medical officers for brief deployments of a few weeks, which the state’s health department said last week do not fulfill needs to support daily job functions.

The staff from the CDC Foundation helped with the “day to day work that supports those disease containment efforts,” while CDC officers would help analyze the massive data generated nearly 22 weeks into the outbreak, Bell said.

(Reporting by Puyaan Singh and Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)