US reports highest number of measles cases since 2019: CDC

(MILWAUKEE) — Kat Cisar, a mother of 6-year-old twins, found out in late February that her kids were potentially being exposed to harmful lead paint and dust at their Milwaukee school. By May, their school was on a growing list of eight others across the city, found to have degrading, chipping interiors that were putting children at risk.

Several schools have had to temporarily close for remediation efforts, including the one Cisar’s kids attend.

“We put a lot of faith in our institutions, in our schools, and it’s just so disheartening when those systems fail,” Cisar said.

Milwaukee’s lead crisis began late last year, when a young student’s high blood lead levels were traced back to the student’s school.

Since then, health officials have been combing through other Milwaukee schools to find deteriorated conditions that could harm more children. The plan now is to inspect roughly half of the district’s 106 schools built before 1978 — when lead paint was banned — in time for school to return in the fall. They plan to inspect the other half before the end of the year.

In the last few months, tests have turned up elevated blood lead levels in at least three more students, and the health department expects that number to grow as it continues to offer free testing clinics around the city.

Lead exposure — especially harmful for young children — can cause growth delays, attention disorders and even brain damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cisar’s own children’s tests for lead levels showed no acute poisoning, but Cisar said they’ll have to keep monitoring it. Her children attended the school for three years.

“When you have little kids who are 3, 4, 5, 6 years old in a classroom like that, that’s worrisome,” she said.

The local impacts of federal cuts

Despite public health officials’ requests, federal help is not coming to Milwaukee — for now. The CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health was gutted on April 1, as part of the Trump administration’s effort to lay off 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), which oversees agencies like FDA and CDC.

The cuts included lead exposure experts who were planning to fly to Milwaukee later that month to help the city respond to the situation.

That has complicated the on-the-ground response, Milwaukee Commissioner of Health Mike Totaraitis told ABC News.

“We rely on the federal government for that expertise,” Totoraitis said. “So to see that eliminated overnight was hard to describe, to say the least.”

Erik Svendsen, division director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health before it was eliminated, said the layoffs have left Milwaukee on its own.

“Without us, there is no other unit at the federal level that is here to support them in doing what they need to do,” Svendsen told ABC News.

And not just when it comes to this lead crisis, Svendsen said. Milwaukee — and other cities — won’t have CDC assistance for other environmental threats that affect the buildings people use, the air people breathe and the water they drink, he said.

“States and local public health departments are on their own now as we prepare for the heat, wildfire, algal bloom, tornado, flood and hurricane seasons,” Svendsen said.

An HHS spokesperson told ABC News the CDC’s lead prevention work will be consolidated under a new division under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — though Svendsen said he and his team have not been rehired.

Without the experts, Svendsen said the future of the work is still in limbo.

For his part, Totoraitis, the Milwaukee health commissioner, said he empathizes with the frustration expressed by parents — some of whom argue that the issue began at a local level and should be solved there.

“Putting my feet in the parents’ shoes… thinking, ‘Hey, I’m sending my kid to school, it should be safe, it should be free of lead hazards’ — and unfortunately, that’s not what we found,” Totoraitis said.

“We found that systemic issues of poor maintenance and poor cleaning had left countless hazards across multiple schools that really put students at danger,” he said.

But the extent of the problem, Totoraitis said, only furthered his department’s reliance on the experts at the CDC, with whom he said they’d been constantly in contact with for the last few months.

Funding crunch: Hire more teachers or paint a wall?

Buildings in the U.S. built before 1978 can be properly maintained by locking the old paint under layers of fresh new paint. But budget constraints in Milwaukee delayed that upkeep, officials said.

“Underfunding in schools for many, many years has really put districts at a very difficult choice of whether they should have teachers in the classroom and lower class sizes or have a paraprofessional to support — or whether they paint a wall,” said Brenda Cassillius, who started as Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent one month ago.

“And so I think now we are learning and growing,” Cassillius said, to “make sure that we have the resources in place to deal with these really serious infrastructure issues.”

Cisar, whose twins are back at their school after cleanup efforts, said she still feels like there’s lots of blame to go around.

The lack of CDC resources, she said, has only compounded a longstanding issue in Milwaukee. But she said the lack of federal support has been disheartening, nonetheless.

“Maybe that would have just been a little bit of help — but it really sends the message of, ‘You don’t matter,'” she said.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), made up of members recently hand-selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., voted 5-1 on Thursday to recommend against flu vaccines containing the preservative thimerosal.

One committee member, Vicky Pebsworth, abstained on each vote.

A few moments before, the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee voted 6-0 to recommend all Americans aged 6 months and older receive an annual influenza vaccine.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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(NEW YORK) — Measles cases have reached 1,046 as the virus continues spreading across the United States, according to data updated Friday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Cases have been confirmed in 30 states including Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

Infectious disease experts have previously said the U.S. is likely on track to surpass the 2019 total of 1,274 cases, which were confirmed over the course of a year. This year’s total also marks the second highest case count in 25 years, CDC data shows.

The CDC says 12% of measles patients in the U.S. this year have been hospitalized, the majority of whom are under age 19.

About 96% of measles cases are among those who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown, according to CDC data.

Meanwhile, 1% of cases are among those who have received just one dose of the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and 2% of cases are among those who received the recommended two doses, according to the CDC.

At least three deaths have been confirmed this year, two among children and one among an adult, all of whom were unvaccinated.

It comes as an unvaccinated traveler with measles may have exposed people at Denver International Airport and a nearby hotel, health officials said on Thursday.

The patient was in the international terminal on Tuesday, May 13, and then took a shuttle to stay at the nearby Quality Inn and Suites that night. The next day, the patient took a shuttle back to the airport and boarded a domestic flight.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment said anybody who may have been exposed on either flight will be directly notified by health officials.

Similarly, a resident of King County in Washington state traveled through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and a medical center while infectious, Public Health – Seattle & King County said on Tuesday. The individual was likely exposed to measles while recently traveling internationally.

Additionally, the New Jersey Department of Health sent out an alert that a non-resident with measles attended the Shakira concert at MetLife stadium last week, potentially exposing people.

Although the concert occurred on May 16, officials warned that people may develop symptoms as late as June 6. So far, no associated cases have been identified.

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.

Measles was declared eliminated from the U.S. in 2000 due to a highly effective vaccination program, according to the CDC. But vaccination rates have been lagging in recent years.

“I think the overall and overarching worry we have is that, as vaccination rates decline, we’re starting to now see very contagious diseases such as measles come back and, generally, you need a 95% immunity wall of the population to stop an outbreak,” Dr. Scott Roberts, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine and medical director of infection prevention at New Haven Hospital, told ABC News.

“There are now many areas of the U.S. where we don’t hit that 95% and it’s much lower than that, and I think we’re seeing the consequences,” he continued.

Roberts say he’s worried about misinformation that has arisen around the MMR vaccine such as a link between the vaccine and autism, which has been debunked by several high-quality studies.

“I worry that we are seeing this misinformation and parents are reading these things on the Internet, which is not based in truth,” he said. “What we try to do as health care providers and public health professionals is really just to give the right information out there that the measles vaccine is safe. It is effective and measles itself is not a run-of-the-mill cold; it can lead to these really devastating consequences if somebody’s vulnerable and gets infected.”

Dr. Karen Tachi Udoh is an internal medicine resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.

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