Nearly 800 cases in South Carolina’s record-breaking measles outbreak
The measles virus. (BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
(SOUTH CAROLINA) — The record-breaking measles outbreak in South Carolina continues to grow with 89 new cases reported since the last update on Friday.
This brings the total number of cases in the outbreak to 789.
At least 557 people are currently in quarantine across the state, including students from various schools.
This is South Carolina’s largest measles outbreak in over 30 years, a spokesperson for the state’s health department told ABC News.
There have been at least 416 confirmed measles cases across the United States so far this year, the latest CDC data shows.
CDC data shows that the majority of cases occur among people under 19. About 2% of all measles cases in the U.S. have been hospitalized.
Dr. Kristin Moffitt, an infectious diseases physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, previously told ABC News she is “very alarmed” by the increase in measles cases in the U.S. over the last year or two.
“I’m very worried about our current year already,” she told ABC News. “Exceeding 2,000 cases in the last year is indeed alarming [and] … I am worried that even our current year is off to a very concerning start.”
Moffitt said that declining vaccination rates across the U.S. are behind the recent increase in measles cases.
“This is entirely due to declining vaccination rates,” she said. “It’s very clear based on where these outbreaks are occurring.”
The CDC currently recommends that people receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, the first at ages 12 to 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is 93% effective, and two doses are 97% effective against measles, the CDC says.
However, federal data shows vaccination rates have been lagging in recent years. During the 2024-2025 school year, 92.5% of kindergartners received the MMR vaccine, according to data. This is lower than the 92.7% seen in the previous school year and the 95.2% seen in the 2019-2020 school year, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The national trends mirror those see in counties across the U.S. A recent map from ABC News — a collaboration with researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard School of Medicine and Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai that allows people to type in their ZIP code and see the measles risk in their area — found a wide range of risks in areas across the U.S.
Some counties and ZIP codes fell into the “lowest risk,” with 85% or more of children under 5 years old receiving one or more measles vaccine dose to “very high risk,” with fewer than 60% of children under age 5 receiving one or more measles vaccine doses.
ABC News’ Mary Kekatos and Dr. Richard Zhang contributed to this report.
The Environmental Protection Agency flag flies outside the EPA headquarters in Washington on Thursday, August 7, 2025. Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — More than two dozen Senate Democrats are launching an independent investigation into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a rule change on how the agency calculates the health benefits from curbing air pollution.
The EPA wrote in its regulatory impact analysis last month that it would no longer apply a dollar value to the health benefits that result from its regulations for fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and ozone because the agency says there’s too much uncertainty in the estimates. In the past, the EPA calculated a dollar value based on the health benefits of reducing air pollution, which included the number of premature deaths and illnesses avoided, such as asthma attacks.
The senators described the new policy as “irrational” and said it will lead to the EPA rejecting actions that would impose “relatively minor costs” on polluting industries that could result in “massive benefits” to public health, according to a letter sent to the EPA on Thursday and obtained by ABC News.
“The only beneficiaries will be polluting industries, many of which are among President Trump’s largest donors,” the senators wrote.
Led by Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Ranking Member Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the senators are requesting documents and information about how EPA made this determination by Feb. 26.
The decision to not quantify the health benefits of environmental regulations is “completely unsupported” and “a very stark departure” from the way the EPA has worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations over the last several decades, said Richard L. Revesz, dean emeritus at the New York University School of Law who specializes in environmental and regulatory law and policy.
The regulatory impact analysis does not cite any science or economics and did not allow for public comments, Revesz told ABC News. The approach was also not submitted to the EPA’s Science Advisory Board, “which is standard,” nor was it submitted for peer review, he added.
“Each of those things are necessary elements for changing scientific policies like this, and EPA violated every single one of them,” Revesz said.
Senate democrats are seeking the basis on which the EPA made the decision; what the EPA willl take into account when undertaking Clean Air Act rulemaking; whether the EPA has discussed ceasing to quantify health effects of other pollutants; and whether the EPA consulted with any third parties, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Surgeon General, public health experts and interested civil society groups.
It was industry executives who pushed for benefit-cost analysis during Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, said Janet McCabe, visiting professor at Indiana University’s McKinney School of Law and former deputy administrator of the EPA between 2021 and 2024. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12866, which instructs each agency to perform rigorous cost benefit analysis for any rule or regulation to be implemented.
“There’s a whole field of environmental economics where models and analytical methods and data collection have evolved on both the cost and the benefit side to help decision-makers and the public understand,” McCabe told ABC News.
While the EPA points to uncertainties in the estimates, assigning a number to monetize health benefits is “very defensible” because of the vast number of studies that allow economists to estimate ranges of health impacts in terms of monetary value, McCabe said.
In the past, when the EPA felt like it could not rigorously assign a number to either cost or health benefit, “it would say so,” McCabe said.
The EPA has received the letter and will respond through the proper channels, an EPA spokesperson told ABC News.
PM2.5 and ozone — soot and smog — are two of the most dangerous and widespread pollutants in the U.S., according to health and environmental policy experts. They are produced by a number of sources, including emissions from vehicles, power plants, the agriculture industry and oil refineries.
The agency is still considering the impacts that fine particulate matter and ozone emissions have on human health, like it “always has,” but that it will not be monetizing the impacts “at this time,” an EPA spokesperson told ABC News last month.
“EPA is fully committed to its core mission of protecting human health and the environment by relying on gold standard science, not the approval of so-called environmental groups that are funded by far-left activists,” the EPA spokesperson said.
The new EPA rule could prove dangerous to human health in the future because it will make it easier for the Trump administration to weaken air pollution controls, the experts who spoke with ABC News said. The EPA will only have the cost to industry to consider when making policy decisions without factoring in the benefits to health, the experts said.
“There will be nothing on the health side to balance them,” McCabe said. “That will make rules much easier to justify from a cost benefit perspective, because all you will see is the costs.”
In its regulatory impact analysis published in January 2024, the EPA calculated the benefit avoided morbidities and premature death in the year 2032 as worth between $22 billion and $46 billion. In February 2024, when the EPA tightened the amount of PM2.5 that could be emitted by industrial facilities, it estimated that the rule would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths by 2032.
This data will no longer be considered under the new rule.
“It’s not even estimating how many deaths that is, even though the models for doing both things have been very well established for a long, long time,” Revesz said.
Ali Staking talks about how she and her family reacted to Eric Richins’ sudden death and Kouri Richins’ subsequent murder trial. (ABC News)
(NEW YORK) — After Kouri Richins was charged with murder for fatally poisoning her husband with fentanyl, a friend of the Utah mother of three had a difficult time reconciling that.
In an exclusive interview with “20/20,” Ali Staking said she and her children were “devastated” about the sudden 2022 death of 39-year-old Eric Richins.
“I said, along the way, ‘Sometimes it looks like Kouri might have done it,'” Staking recalled saying to her children. “Then my kids would say, ‘Well, did she?’ And I’d say ‘I don’t think so. But, you know, it sometimes looks like it.'”
A Summit County jury ultimately found 35-year-old Kouri Richins guilty of aggravated murder on Monday, after prosecutors argued during the three-week trial that she killed her husband for financial gain by giving him a lethal dose of fentanyl in a cocktail.
Eric Richins was found dead in bed on March 4, 2022. An autopsy determined that he died from fentanyl intoxication, and the level of fentanyl in his blood was approximately five times the lethal dosage, according to the charging document. The medical examiner determined the fentanyl was “illicit fentanyl,” not medical grade, according to the charging document.
Kouri Richins, who self-published a children’s book on grief following her husband’s death, was arrested in May 2023 following a lengthy investigation.
The charges alleged that she spiked his drink with a lethal dose of fentanyl that she purchased illicitly, and that she also gave her husband a sandwich laced with fentanyl on Valentine’s Day two weeks before his death in an initial, failed attempt to kill him.
Prosecutors argued that Kouri Richins wanted a “fresh start” and to leave her husband, but didn’t want to leave his money. They said she was in “financial desperation” due to her house flipping business’ debts and needed a significant influx of cash immediately.
According to prosecutors, she believed she would have financially benefited from her husband’s death — without realizing that his assets were in a trust overseen by one of his sisters.
A jury found her guilty of all five counts, including aggravated murder and attempted aggravated murder, after about three hours of deliberations on Monday. She was also found guilty of insurance fraud for taking out a $100,000 insurance policy on her husband’s life with his forged signature and also for submitting a claim following his death.
Kouri Richins, who had pleaded not guilty and asserted her innocence from jail, did not testify during the trial and the defense called no witnesses. Her sentencing has been scheduled for May 13. She faces 25 years to life in prison.
Staking, who testified during the trial, said she was “very surprised that there was no defense.”
ABC News contributor Brian Buckmire suggested this was a reflection of the defense’s confidence.
“They may believe the prosecution didn’t make out their case, that having any witness on the stand wouldn’t make sense because they’ve already won their case,” he told “20/20.”
Staking said it was “surreal” learning that Eric Richins had died, describing him as a “dedicated dad” and a “goofy cowboy dude who loved to dance.”
“He had so much more life to live and he wanted so much for his boys,” she said. “I’m gonna remember just how much he loved them.”
Kouri Richins also faces more than two dozen charges in a separate case filed last year, including allegations that she committed mortgage fraud in 2021. The charging document alleges she submitted falsified bank statements in support of mortgage loan applications for her realty business, committed money laundering and issued bad checks.
The charges in the case also allege she murdered her husband for financial gain as she “stood on the precipice of total financial collapse.”
She has not yet entered a plea to those charges.
Staking said she wants Eric Richins to be remembered as a “loving dad.”
“I believe Eric is with his kids all the time every day,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anywhere else he’d wanna be.”
Matthew Perry of the television show ‘The Kennedys – After Camelot’ speaks onstage during the REELZChannel portion of the 2017 Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour at the Langham Hotel, Jan. 13, 2017, in Pasadena, Calif. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
(LOS ANGELES) — A woman reportedly known as the “Ketamine Queen,” who admitted to providing the ketamine that killed Matthew Perry, should serve 15 years in prison for her “cold callousness and disregard for life,” federal prosecutors said in a new court filing ahead of her sentencing.
Defense attorneys for Jasveen Sangha, who has been behind bars since her arrest in August 2024 in connection with the 54-year-old “Friends” actor’s fatal overdose, asked for time served, according to a court filing.
Sangha pleaded guilty last year to one count of maintaining a drug-involved premises, three counts of distribution of ketamine, and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death or serious bodily injury. She admitted to working with another dealer to provide Perry with dozens of vials of ketamine in the weeks before his death in October 2023, including the ketamine that killed him, according to the plea agreement.
She also admitted in the plea agreement to selling ketamine in connection with another overdose death, prosecutors said. The victim, Cody McLaury, died hours after Sangha sold him four vials of ketamine in August 2019, according to the DOJ.
In a sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday, prosecutors said Sangha ran a “high-volume drug trafficking business out of her North Hollywood residence,” where she stored, packaged and distributed drugs, including ketamine and methamphetamine since at least 2019. They said she continued to sell “dangerous drugs” even after learning she sold ketamine that contributed to the deaths of McLaury and Perry.
“She didn’t care and kept selling,” prosecutors wrote. “Defendant’s actions show a cold callousness and disregard for life. She chose profits over people, and her actions have caused immense pain to the victims’ families and loved ones.
“That defendant had the opportunity to stop after realizing the impact of her dealing — but simply chose not to,” warranting a “significant” sentence, they continued.
The defense, meanwhile, said Sangha should receive a sentence of time served due to her “demonstrated rehabilitation.”
“She has maintained sustained and exemplary sobriety, and actively engaged in recovery-oriented and rehabilitative programming while in custody, and has tremendously strong family and community support to facilitate successful reentry and reduce the risk of recidivism,” her attorneys, Mark Geragos and Alexandra Kazarian, wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday.
Sangha faces a maximum sentence of 65 years in prison. She is scheduled to be sentenced in Los Angeles on April 8.
In addition to Sangha, four other people were charged and pleaded guilty in connection with Perry’s death — the other dealer, Erik Fleming; Kenneth Iwamasa, Perry’s live-in personal assistant; and two doctors, Mark Chavez and Salvador Plasencia.
Prosecutors said Sangha worked with Fleming to distribute ketamine to Perry, and that in October 2023, they sold the actor 51 vials of ketamine that were provided to Iwamasa.
“Leading up to Perry’s death, Iwamasa repeatedly injected Perry with the ketamine that Sangha supplied to Fleming,” the DOJ said in a press release last year. “Specifically, on October 28, 2023, Iwamasa injected Perry with at least three shots of Sangha’s ketamine, which caused Perry’s death.”
Iwamasa pleaded guilty in August 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine causing death and is scheduled to be sentenced on April 22.
Fleming pleaded guilty in August 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death and is set to be sentenced on April 29.
Chavez and Plasencia have also been convicted for their roles in what prosecutors called a conspiracy to illegally distribute ketamine to Perry.
Chavez, who once ran a ketamine clinic, pleaded guilty in October 2024 to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and was sentenced to eight months home confinement in December 2025.
Plasencia, who briefly treated Perry prior to his death, pleaded guilty in July 2025 to four counts of distribution of ketamine and was sentenced to 30 months in prison in December 2025.
