 With 73 confirmed cases, the measles outbreak in Minnesota has now surpassed the total number of cases in the United States in 2016. Last year, 70 cases of measles were diagnosed nationwide and at the heart of the current Minnesota outbreak is an ongoing debate. Should parents have their children vaccinated? Clayton Castle traveled to St. Paul to make an in-depth look at the vaccination debate. It's a virus that has ravaged the state of Minnesota for the better part of the last two months. With over 70 cases statewide, the measles outbreak has been deemed the largest outbreak in Minnesota in the last 30 years. The largest concentration of cases is in the Cedar Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, which is a predominantly Somali-American population where there has been an ongoing debate for years about the effectiveness of the measles mumps in Rubella, or MMR, vaccine. Many reports say that as many as 42 percent of Somali-American children were unvaccinated prior to the beginning of the recent measles outbreak. I talked to Dr. Steve Vincent, Chief Medical Officer of the People Center, located in the heart of Cedar Riverside, and asked him why Somali children were unvaccinated before the outbreak. Well, it was fear of autism that could be caused by the MMR vaccine. It's an unfounded fear. It's based on a study from England nearly 20 years ago in the 1990s. They got your weight field that was later found to be falsified. Leo Cashman of the Minnesota Natural Health Coalition, an anti-vaccination advocacy group, states that the MMR vaccine still causes autism. There have been findings of the vaccine type of measles virus in the intestines of children with autism. And this is what has been found in Minnesota in the Somali community. They find that there is an onset of some kind of vaccine injury. It might be autism. It might be encephalitis. The child loses the normal ability to speak. The Somali community has noticed this and has observed it and talked about it and gotten more information about it. Now, after hearing the claim that the measles MMR vaccine causes autism, I came here to downtown St. Paul and visited with Chris Aresman of the Minnesota Department of Health and asked her if there was any merit to that claim. There have been a number of studies, so multiple studies by different researchers using different methodologies and performed in different places that have all refuted a link between vaccines and autism. And so that to me is what's really important is what did this science show. And for Aresman, a mother of two, the vaccination debate is personal and hits home for her like it does for many parents across Minnesota. The reason that I can say with confidence that I believe in vaccines is the two most important people in my life are my children and they are fully vaccinated. And if I had any concerns about the value of vaccines, I wouldn't have vaccinated my own children. In the end, the light at the end of the tunnel could be near for the measles outbreak as the rate of confirmed cases has slowed down drastically in the past two weeks. However, science are pointing to a much longer vaccination debate, which will outlive the 2017 Minnesota measles outbreak. Reporting in St. Paul Clayton Castle, Lakeland News. Symptoms of measles include runny nose, cough and fever followed by a rash spanning the entire body. Among the 73 cases of measles in Minnesota, four of them are in Crowing County. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.