Zorba Paster: The measles outbreak is no joke. Get your child vaccinated.

Lots of people have asked me about measles since outbreaks began occurring recently in some parts of the United States. Let’s dive into a little history.

The first measles vaccine became widely available in 1963. Before that, measles was accepted as a common childhood disease, something you were expected to get. It was even encouraged for children so they could get over it because getting measles was so much worse as an adult.

I remember when I got measles, since I’m old enough to have predated the vaccine. My mom was worried I would go blind, a possible complication of measles. So, I had to tough it out in my dark bedroom in Chicago that summer because she had the mistaken idea it would help. It was August, and I wasn’t allowed to watch TV or read due to her fears.

She served me boiled beef and potatoes because she’d heard from friends that those foods would fend off meningitis, another complication of measles. The year I had measles, about 1,000 kids and adults in the U.S. died from the disease.

So you can imagine how wonderful it was when the vaccine came out. Measles cases dropped dramatically. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that measles was eliminated in the U.S.

There was no spread of the disease at all. None. Measles cases were done. Over. Finished. Uh-huh.

They were right that year, but they’re wrong now because we have been lax.

When it comes to the measles vaccine, part of the MMR vaccine series for measles, mumps and rubella, Wisconsin falls to the bottom of the list. We are No. 49 out of 50 states in measles vaccination rates for children.

How did that happen? Are we just lazy? Or are we just dumb?

By the way, my wife Penny would always hate when I used that word (dumb) because it is so insulting. But sometimes insulting is just what I want to be — and this is one of those times. It is simply dumb not to immunize against measles.

Measles is the most contagious viral disease of them all. If you’re unimmunized and in the room with someone who has measles, there is a 95 percent chance you’ll get it. Measles is contagious about four to five days before the rash is out and continues being contagious for the next four to five days after the rash starts.

Treatment involves supportive care for the diarrhea and dehydration that usually occurs: fluids, Tylenol for the fever, TLC, chicken soup. Antibiotics don’t work. Antivirals don’t work. And this goofy idea that cod liver oil works is a hoax. You just have to get through it — hopefully.

Complications can be numerous and severe. I’ll list just a few of them: pneumonia, encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), seizures, paralysis, blindness, hemorrhagic fever, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (a progressive brain disease that develops years after measles infection) and, of course, death.

Wow, those are some bad outcomes. Who knew, you ask? We knew!

We are asleep at the wheel because of fake news. There is a fear among some that the measles vaccine causes autism — a myth first perpetrated by a rogue doctor in the United Kingdom who made a fortune flitting around the world and lecturing about his terrible misinformation.

That man, Andrew Wakefield, is no longer permitted to practice medicine. He is a fraudster, plain and simple, and an anti-vaccine activist who had his medical license revoked for “serious professional misconduct” involving a fraudulent 1998 MMR-autism study.

The research, published in The Lancet medical journal, falsely claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. It eventually was determined that Wakefield had been dishonest in his study. He faked the data in order to enrich his pockets. In the ensuing years, no link has ever been found between vaccines and autism.

But actors Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy took the bait and ran with it — getting too many people in America hooked on this myth that somehow vaccines and autism were linked.

That includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the country’s new secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, who has swallowed this hook, line and sinker. Another key figure, Jay Bhattacharya, the new pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, also has left the door open to this nonsense.

Now an aside. I rarely discuss politics in my column. But I am biased — biased toward science. If our politicians oppose science, I find it my duty to oppose them. Now you know where I stand so that you, the reader, can make your own decision. The best patient is the informed patient.

I am proudly a science geek — with all its foibles. Scientific knowledge is an evolving body of statements of varying degrees of certainty, including some nearly sure and others mostly unsure. None are absolutely certain. Quality research and sound evidence point the way. Science changes its mind with research. When the autism/measles question came forth, scientists conducted research — the right thing to do — and proved that there is no link.

As said by Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine: “Science is at once the most questioning and … skeptical of activities and also the most trusting.

“It is intensely skeptical about the possibility of error, but totally trusting about the possibility of fraud.”

Never has this been truer than of the 1998 Lancet paper that implied a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and a “new syndrome” of autism and bowel disease.

My spin: Wake up, Wisconsin. Get your kids immunized. Measles is misery. You don’t want you or your child to suffer the dreaded complications of measles. Stay well.