Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 5:49 and sunset is 8:11, for 14 hours, 22 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1889, the Great Fire of Spokane, Washington destroys some 32 blocks of the city, prompting a mass rebuilding project.
Years of anti-vaccine claims from ignorant but insistent Facebookers1 take a toll. One reads, sadly yet expectedly, that Wisconsin sees first measles cases, with 9 confirmed in Oconto County:
Nine cases of measles have been confirmed in Oconto County, and local public health officials are working to identify and notify people who may have been exposed to the virus.
The state Department of Health Services said in a statement Saturday that those are the first confirmed cases of the virus in Wisconsin this year.
One of the cases was confirmed through testing at the state hygiene lab, and the other eight were confirmed based on exposure and symptoms, health officials say.
….
Measles can be prevented by the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine. The state health department says two doses of the vaccine are 97 percent effective at preventing the disease.
“In general, people born before 1957 are considered immune and do not need a vaccine,” the state health agency said in a statement. “All other adults without laboratory evidence of immunity should have at least one dose of measles-containing vaccine, and children should have two doses.”
Wisconsin has one of the lowest Measles vaccination rates among children in the country. As of 2023, 81 percent of 2-year-olds had the vaccine, down from 88 percent in 2013. Some Wisconsin counties had vaccination rates closer to 50 percent.
See Joe Schulz, Wisconsin sees first Measles cases, with 9 confirmed in Oconto County (‘Cases reported nationally hit their highest level in 33 years in July’), Wisconsin Public Radio, August 3, 2025.
We have in Wisconsin the highly flexible Assembly Speaker Robin Vos2 to advise on public health, as he did during the pandemic, reacting one way, then another within a year.
Vos is sure to have an answer drawn from his lifetime of public health study.
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- Hidden camera footage of Facebook anti-vaxxers in action ↩︎
- Vos is a figure of admiration among Whitewater’s special interest men: they look upon him as deservedly important, as proof that talents like theirs can take a man places. ↩︎
France’s Macron to honor Paris’ last known newspaper hawker: