9 things everybody should know about measles

There's one fact that makes the measles virus really scary: it's one of the most infectious diseases known to man. A person with measles can cough in a room, leave, and — if you were unvaccinated — hours later, you could catch the virus from the droplets in the air that they left behind. No other virus can do that. If your parents were born before 1960, there's a good chance they suffered through a measles infection. They may have lived to tell about it, but they may have had friends who didn't. In the US, before a vaccine was introduced in 1963, there were four million measles cases with 48,000 hospitalizations and 500 deaths every year.