City Tracks 21 New Measles Cases Back to One Williamsburg Yeshiva

New York City's health department has tracked 21 newly identified measles cases back to one yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, officials said Thursday.

Those cases, plus an additional five this week, bring the number of people sickened during the outbreak up to 121 cases since October, the city's largest outbreak of the highly contagious virus in nearly 30 years, officials said.

No one has died during the current outbreak. Eight children have been hospitalized, and one child who has since recovered was in the intensive care unit, according to the health department.

Since mid-December, when the health department issued an order requiring all children within certain Williamsburg and Borough Park zip codes to stay home from school if they weren't vaccinated for measles, three schools have been found in violation, according to the health department.

In the case of one school, Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov on Wilson Street, a child without vaccines who had the measles but wasn't symptomatic and attended school in mid-January, spreading the virus to others. The school couldn't be reached for comment right away. As of last school year, 92.7 percent of children were immunized for measles, according to the most recent data from the state health department.

If school hadn't allowed non-immunized students to attend, said said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the Deputy Commissioner of Disease Control at the Health Department, "the unvaccinated kid who got measles wouldn't have been in the school and there wouldn't have been a bunch of other [unvaccinated] students in the school and they wouldn't have gotten measles. So we would actually be at closer to what would be the tail end of this outbreak."

The vast majority of children within the Orthodox community have been vaccinated, and an estimated 1,800 kids are currently out of school for not having vaccines. About 7,000 children have gotten measles vaccines since the outbreak began, the city said.

Rabbi David Niederman, president of United Jewish Organizations an umbrella group for the Orthodox community in North Brooklyn, has been urging residents to get vaccinated for months and said he was shocked that the yeshiva wasn't complying.

"Everyone has to comply with the applicable laws because infecting other people is totally unacceptable," he said.