The Health Significance of Families Seen through the Recent Measles Outbreak

Earlier this year, at least 95 measles cases were linked to Disneyland, the fabled family destination. In this commentary, I leverage the recent rise of U.S. measles cases to illuminate the ways in which families’ social traits matter for individual and public health. I conclude with suggestions for increasing scholarship in this exciting field within social epidemiology.

Current medical care and research tends to focus on individual risk and protective factors, often overlooking how family ties and experiences influence health. Even when we implicitly realize that families influence health, our conceptual models and data structures often reduce families to individual traits and, thus, obscure their importance. 

This is exemplified in measles patients’ medical charts. Of the 159 documented measles cases presenting during the first half of 2013 in the U.S., 63% were children and 81% were unvaccinated. Five percent of the unvaccinated, pediatric patients missed their vaccination opportunities; 13% were too young for vaccination; and 79% had philosophical objections. Yet it is important to recognize who had the philosophical objections and missed the vaccination opportunities: it was the parents, not the children. This expedient recording of the parents’ behavior as a trait of the patient erases the family unit entirely, masking the ways in which familial ties influence health. Read more.................