WASHINGTON -- Tuesday's hearing at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on the re-emergence of vaccine-preventable diseases brought an unusual dose of bipartisan harmony to Capitol Hill.

The hearing's tone was evident right from the start. "Vaccines save lives," said committee chairman Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who thanked Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the committee's ranking member, for helping put together the witness list. "They take deadly, awful, ravaging diseases from horror to history."

Because vaccination's benefits are so well-understood, "it's troubling to hear that before we've even reached Valentine's Day this year, 121 Americans are sick with measles ... and a growing number of parents are not following the recommendations of doctors and public health professionals," Alexander said.

Murray agreed, noting that the measles outbreak "made clear that vaccine-preventable diseases are still a threat and we cannot afford to become complacent. ... We need to ensure in any [locations] where take-up rates are low that we're providing information and spreading awareness so more people can be protected."

The hearing's first witness, Anne Schuchat, MD, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC in Atlanta, said part of the reason the measles outbreak occurred was that the U.S. has been "a victim of its own success" in combating vaccine-preventable diseases.

"Because of our success, fewer and fewer doctors and parents have witnessed serious and sometimes life-threatening consequences of diseases," and instead parents worry about the risks of vaccination and temporary discomfort to the children, Schuchat said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asked Schuchat about President Obama's proposed $50 million cut to a part of the CDC's budget -- known as Section 317 of the Public Health Service Act -- that provides federal funding for vaccinations of uninsured children and adults. "It seems to me it's exactly the wrong time for us to be reducing funding in this area," Collins said.

Schuchat responded that because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) requiring insurers to cover vaccines at no cost to patients, public health clinics will now be able to bill patients' insurers for the cost of vaccines rather than paying for the vaccines themselves, so that will make up for much of the money lost.

Kelly Moore, MD, MPH, director of the immunization program at the Tennessee Department of Health in Nashville, testified that even a single case of measles "requires a strong public health response." She said that on one Friday afternoon, a doctor had called her office about a patient with an uncertain immunization history and recent overseas travel who had definite measles symptoms; the office identified 124 people who had been exposed to that patient.

Since the measles vaccine was a good way to protect those who had come in contact with the patient, 120 of those 124 contacts were vaccinated the next day, and overall three more people developed measles, Moore said, noting that a total of 400 possible contacts were evaluated.

"A great deal of credit goes to hard work of public health at all levels," she added, "[but this result] could only be achieved in a state where a large percentage of the population was already immune."

The committee also heard from Tim Jacks, DO, a pediatrician in Gilbert, Ariz., and the father of two children, including a 10-month-old son and a 3-year-old daughter, Maggie, who is battling leukemia. Three weeks ago, when Jacks' wife -- with their son in tow -- took Magdalene to the clinic where she receives chemotherapy, the three of them were exposed to measles.

"We were informed and instructed to return for shots, which we did," Jacks said. "Right now my two children are at home under quarantine [for 3 weeks]." Jacks, who had been writing a blog about his daughter's illness, wrote a blog post about the experience at the clinic in the form of a letter to the parents of the unvaccinated child; the post went viral.

Jacks pointed out that at 10 months, his son is too young to receive a measles vaccine, while his daughter, who is immunocompromised, is at particular risk of getting sick.

"My hope is we can prevent some families from going through the same thing we've gone through," he said. "As immunization rates drop, herd immunity starts to break down, and this herd immunity is the only thing that protects my two children from being exposed to measles or whatever next outbreak is."

One of the few partisan notes to the hearing -- in the form of a comment on the ACA -- came from Sen. Bill Cassidy, MD (R-La.), a gastroenterologist.

"You seem to concur that the ACA may have improved immunization rates, but I think we know that with the CHIP [Children's Health Insurance] program and the Vaccines For Children (VFC) program -- I've done a lot of immunization work among children -- that really cost has not been a barrier for immunization for children for some time," he said to the CDC's Schuchat, who agreed with him.

"I do think it's important for the record [to say that] for childhood immunization, the ACA has really not hurt, but it has certainly not augmented that which was previously there."

Sen. Robert Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) asked what was being done to help physicians learn to deal with parents' concerns about vaccines. Mark Sawyer, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of California San Diego, noted that "there are efforts underway... I have a curriculum for residents about immunization, and 3 or 4 years ago, I added a whole section to that curriculum to teach residents in training how to communicate about vaccine safety."

"The problem is there is so much inaccurate information circulating ... That's what we need to try to address," he continued. "To raise science literacy in the U.S. -- that's a tall task, but I think without that we're never going to win this battle."