Measles spreads to Christian Scientist

(Clarification: A headline on a City & Region story yesterday about a worker at the Christian Science Church who has contracted measles may have suggested that the church officially opposes vaccinations. The church does not take a stand on vaccinations, although it embraces the principle of healing through prayer rather than medicine.)

The state's first measles outbreak in seven years has spread to a man who works at the Boston headquarters of the Christian Science church, raising fears that the disease will spread among church members who do not believe in vaccinations.

The man, who is in his late 30s, developed a telltale rash Wednesday and is recovering. Health authorities said he had not been at work during the period when he was infectious, although he had socialized with half a dozen co-workers during the time he was contagious, said Dr. Anita Barry , Boston's director of communicable disease control.

Those six co-workers, along with the man who is ill, have been ordered to stay at home until it's certain they're not infectious, Barry said. Such quarantine measures are a common, long-accepted way to contain the spread of contagious diseases.

It is unclear how the man -- the eighth person to develop measles in Boston in the last four weeks -- contracted the highly contagious viral illness. The seven earlier patients, all of whom are recovering, were employees at a financial services firm in the John Hancock Tower .

The migration of the virus from a single company was especially concerning to infectious disease specialists, who said it could foreshadow a larger outbreak of a disease that can be lethal.

Barry said, there ``is likely to be a large pool of susceptible people" who work at the church headquarters, which employed 532 people as of April.

Unlike at the financial services company, emergency vaccinations are not expected to be an option at the iconic Christian Science campus on Huntington Avenue.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist , embraces a principle of healing through prayer rather than medicine.

That made it all the more urgent that church workers who might have been exposed refrain from leaving home for about three weeks, Barry said.

``They're being advised they can't come into work and to stay out of public gatherings, don't go out shopping, don't go to church, don't go play on a sports team -- whatever you would do that would be exposing other people," Barry said. ``That is what we would be asking them to do to protect other people."

In 1989, a Boston measles outbreak began when a worshiper carrying the virus attended Sunday school services at the Christian Science campus, leading to 15 infections.

Dr. Alfred DeMaria , top disease investigator at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, said church members always have cooperated with public health demands for quarantine. ``They see it as the other side of the coin for not being vaccinated," he said.

A telephone message left last night at the church offices was not returned.

The first case in the recent cluster at Investors Bank & Trust in the Hancock Tower was traced to a computer programmer who had just arrived from India on a work assignment. That man had not been vaccinated. But the timing of his sickness -- in early May -- made it clear the latest patient couldn't have caught it from him.

That means he contracted it from another Investors Bank worker or from some other source.

``It makes you wonder if this guy had lunch in the Prudential Center next to someone from the bank who was sick," said Dr. Roy Welker , director of travel health services at Brigham and Women's Hospital .

Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.