I live in a town not far from Jefferson County.
I read though some FB posts over the weekend and discovered so many comments from the masses who have no basic understanding of disease and public health. They will eventually drag us back to the Dark Ages. It’s disheartening.
Today’s Pennsylvania measles death announcement is from Mifflin County:
Coroner Andrea Alcalde via Facebook
Again, we have an elected GOP country coroner whose statement makes no mention that there is an immunization which can prevent this.
I, and I’m guessing, a couple million others, did get an email yesterday, from Penn Medicine, with the subject “Measles cases on the rise in our region.” That communication does advise immunization:
Vaccination is the best way to protect yourself and your loved ones against measles.
Yeah I don’t know if I hold the coroner office to a high standard on public health communication? Not their job really.
Re last post, I live in one of the Democratic Party controlled counties in the outbreak area, and we have a separate county Health Department that is publicizing need for immunzation:
So I don’t think our coroner needs to jump in on public health communication.
It is better now that the GOP coroners are admitting the cause of death. But, bad as many of the non-fatal measles cases are, I think fatalities present a strong educational opportunity. I’m afraid that there will eventually be deaths in some of the counties with a Democratic Party elected coroner and no health department, and we will see how they treat it.
“died OF” vs. “died WITH” and how much attention to give “contributing causes” was always a discussion in mortality reports, and had spiked after the coming of HIV, but ISTM that at least in the USA it truly blew up big after the politization of Covid-19 response. And of course at the opposite end of the spectrum you have the people who yell and scream about the vaccine shots and “Turbo Cancer” 
The large number of elected lower-level officials in the USA is a legacy artifact of the Old Times when you did not have a large civil service bureaucracy of trained professionals and as citizens you’d be left to fill necessary jobs by election or sortition among yourselves. With time in many of those jurisdictions it just became “the way we do it” and enshrined in local statute or state constitutions.
I’m not sure to what extent you are disagreeing with me, but in case it is substantial:
Because HIV is hardly ever cured, and treatments are good, sure, it is normal to die with HIV, not of. But because measles symptoms last roughly nine days, it would be an enormous coincidence if someone died of something else during those nine days.
Now, when someone dies of measles, they often will have had some other medical diagnosis that made them more vulnerable to measles death. Although I have criticized the GOP coroners, and will continue to do so when their county has no health official recommending immunization, this from one of them, interviewed by the Atlantic, is a fair description of what may happen:
Anti-vaccine types may read this and think that the case is irrelevant because they aren’t on oxygen. But if you add up all the semi-rare conditions that could make a person more vulnerable to fatal measles – it includes HIV – you have a significant portion of the population there and probably at least one friend or relative in that group. I am in the group because of chronic lymphocytic leukemia which is unlikely to kill me, but makes me (and the many people who have it without knowing) more vulnerable to infections.
Also, for every measles death during the days when it is symptomatic, there may be another months later, when their immune system is still depressed by the measles (see immune amnesia), that cannot be linked to the measles even though they will still be alive without having gotten it.
FYI from Politifact-
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said despite high healthcare spending, the U.S. is failing its children on an unprecedented level…Some data shows chronic disease rates are rising and children in the U.S. have a higher mortality rate than children in other developed countries. But Kennedy’s statement ignores the major reductions in childhood illness and death achieved over the last 200 years, and he’s wrong that the U.S. has the “sickest children” in history.
We rate that False.
and this-