Chances are, this woman, while "severely ill" by the time she reached Alberquerque, was still in the prodrome stage. That means her symptoms would have been indistinguishable from the common cold. If she wasn't hacking and sneezing, and "only" had a raging fever, muscle aches and fatigue, she could have quite easily not been noticed by airport security or flight personnel. Since the woman is probably not in health care, she's not exactly likely to know that these were the symptoms of something serious like measles or influenza. Even if she'd been a physician or a nurse, if she wasn't cheerfully obsessed by infectious diseases like I am (I'm not a doctor or nurse, but I am in health care), she wouldn't be likely to associate her symptoms with something as serious as measles.

I know. I spent many long flights as a child slumped in my seat because I'd caught influenza or just a bad cold that hadn't hit my nose and throat yet. And before you get all wound up and get on me for knowingly infecting people, I was 8 to 10 years old, and knew that if I told my mother, she would only yell at me about how I was just trying to "ruin" this trip (even if it was a flight we had to take because we were moving to another continent). I was not in a position to declare that I was infectious and needed to be isolated at home or in a hospital bed, even if I'd understood the danger of spreading infectious diseases.

There was a time when most children in the United States were vaccinated adequately against measles (the MMR vaccine), but we can all thank Jennie McCarthy and a now thoroughly discredited study for causing a significant number of parents to avoid having their children vaccinated. That's also why more children are now coming down with (and even dying from) whooping cough. The fear of vaccines (or mercury, depending on how specific you want to get) causing autism (they don't) has dropped vaccination rates significantly. It's stupid, but there you have it.

Many people don't remember the "good old days", when you didn't dare go to the public pool or swimming hole in summer because you might catch polio. They don't remember seeing photographs (or the real thing) of patients laying in iron lungs in hospital wards. They don't remember children dying, or recovering blinded or deaf from measles. Measles CAN be a very big deal. It's one of the diseases that helped to decimate previously unexposed Native American populations (as well as smallpox). If there's a vaccine for it, there is a greater risk of disability or death from the disease than the vaccine. It's that simple.

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