Students and staff warned to ‘stay away’ from Albany Senior High School after new measles case identified

Students and staff at an Auckland high school are being warned to “stay away” after a pupil came to class with measles.

A student at Albany Senior High School was on campus on April 27 and 28 while infectious with the disease.

All household contacts are currently in quarantine, public health authorities said last night. The school has been ordered to close today and tomorrow by Auckland Regional Public Health.

“While the school is already closed for a teachers’ only day, information has been sent to the school community alerting them to the additional school closure on Friday,” public health authorities said.

Public health staff are investigating the source of the infection and said the student had not been overseas recently, which meant they were infected by someone with measles within New Zealand.

Albany Senior High School, on Auckland’s North Shore, teaches students from Year 11 to 13 and had a roll in 2022 of close to 800.

The source of the student’s infection is likely to be a person known to them who has recently travelled abroad.

“Measles is a highly infectious illness and can make people very unwell. It spreads very easily amongst people who have not had measles before, or who have not been immunised,” National Public Health Service Interim Clinical Lead, Dr William Rainger said.

”Parents can check on their children’s immunity by looking in the blue Well Child Tamariki Ora or Plunket Book Child Health or Plunket book or asking their medical centre about vaccination.“

Rainger said authorities will “continue to see measles cases coming into Aotearoa New Zealand”, given high rates of infection in other pockets of the world.