By the late 1990s, annual cases of measles in the United States dwindled to a few dozen, down from more than 27,000 in 1990. However, the disease remained a mainstay of medical education for dermatologists. While few trainees might see measles in practice, the thinking went, the lesions were still a useful benchmark for diagnosing viral skin diseases.
“We naturally compare things to measles,” said Esther Freeman, MD, PhD, director of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, and chair of the American Academy of Dermatology (AAD)’s Emerging Diseases Task Force, in an interview. “We’re taught that the morbilliform rash — morbilliform literally means measles-like — is a particular characteristic viral rash.”
Now, as a measles…