US surpasses 1,000 measles cases for 1st time in 5 years: CDC
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(NEW YORK) — The U.S. has surpassed 1,000 measles cases for the first time in five years, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published Friday.
A total of 1,001 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.
The last time the U.S. recorded more than 1,000 cases occurred in 2019, when there were 1,274 confirmed infections over the course of a year, CDC data shows.
The CDC says 13% of measles patients in the U.S. this year have been hospitalized, the majority of whom are under age 19.
Among the nationally confirmed cases, CDC says about 96% are among people who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown.
Meanwhile, 2% are among those who have received just one dose of the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine and 2% are among those who received the required two doses, according to the CDC.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Kat Cisar and her six-year-old twins, who attend a Milwaukee school that was found to have hazardous lead in the building. (ABC News)
(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.
(LUBBOCK, TEXAS) — A second child in Texas has died of measles, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
“The school-aged child who tested positive for measles was hospitalized in Lubbock and passed away on Thursday from what the child’s doctors described as measles pulmonary failure,” the statement said, in part. “The child was not vaccinated and had no reported underlying conditions.”
The University Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, said the child had been receiving care for “complications of measles while hospitalized” and also emphasized, as the state health department did, that the child was unvaccinated with no underlying conditions.
An unvaccinated school-aged child also died of measles in Texas in late February, according to the Texas Department of Health Services – the first measles death in a decade in the United States. A week later, an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico died with measles, the New Mexico Department of Health reported.
The outbreak has so far led to 642 confirmed cases across 22 states, but the vast majority — 499 cases — have been in Texas, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy posted on X on Sunday afternoon.
Kennedy also said in the post that he visited Texas on Sunday to “comfort” the family of the child. He said he’d developed a close relationship with the impacted community — which has largely been unvaccinated — including the family of the first child to die in the outbreak.
He added that the “most effective way to prevent the spread of measles” is the measles, mumps and rubella — or MMR — vaccine.
The HHS secretary, who has a long history of vaccine skepticism, has come under fire from public health officials for downplaying the measles outbreak and not advocating enough for widespread vaccination.
In Kennedy’s first public comments on the measles outbreak last month, he said that outbreaks were not “uncommon” because they happen every year and declined to specifically encourage vaccination.
Public health experts who criticized Kennedy pointed out that outbreaks do not have to happen every year and are preventable with the MMR vaccine, which is 97% effective with two doses. Kennedy has since repeated that the vaccine is the “most effective way” to prevent measles, though often also noted that it’s a “personal choice.”
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who publicly wrestled with his support for Kennedy but eventually voted to support him as HHS secretary, said the second death in Texas proved that “top health officials” should be “unequivocally” encouraging the vaccine.
“Everyone should be vaccinated!” Cassidy wrote on X Sunday. “There is no treatment for measles. No benefit to getting measles. Top health officials should say so unequivocally [before] another child dies.”
The Texas Department of State Health Services said on April 4 that Texas is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in 30 years.
There are more than double the number of cases of measles in the U.S. in the first quarter of this year than the entirety of last year, which saw 285 cases nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
These are the highest number of measles cases in the U.S. since 2019, which saw 1,274 cases, according to the CDC. New Mexico is experiencing its worst measles outbreak in 40 years, with 54 cases. Kansas and Ohio are also experiencing outbreaks.
If the number of this year’s cases continues to grow at the current rate, the U.S. would likely surpass that 2019 number, which would lead to the highest number of cases in the U.S. since 1992.
The U.S. declared measles eliminated in the year 2000, after finding no continuous spread of the highly contagious disease over 12 months. The country would be at risk of losing that status if an outbreak continued for more than one year. The Texas outbreak saw its first measles cases in January.
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.
In his statement on Sunday, Kennedy said a CDC team was deployed to Texas in early March to support state and local health officials and to supply pharmacies and clinics with MMR vaccines.
“I’ve spoken to Governor Abbott, and I’ve offered HHS’ continued support. At his request, we have redeployed CDC teams to Texas. We will continue to follow Texas’ lead and to offer similar resources to other affected jurisdictions,” he said in the post.
Kennedy’ visit to Texas comes shortly after the secretary, a prominent vaccine skeptic, has cut one-fourth of the HHS workforce and one-fifth of those employed by the CDC.
The HHS recently clawed back roughly $11 billion in funding from state and local health departments for COVID recovery efforts, saying the money was no longer needed as the pandemic was over. But health officials said the money was being used to better equip communities’ abilities to deal with the spread of diseases — including measles — and better prepare for the next pandemic.
Dr. Philip Huang, the top health official for the city of Dallas, told ABC News that the cuts to the HHS funding and its workforce could impact efforts to respond to the measles outbreak in his state.
“This definitely impacts our measles response,” he said. “We were looking to build out our lab capacity, some of our ability to get immunizations out into the community and into schools.”
“These smaller health departments, they don’t have many staff. You make a small cut and that takes away a considerable percentage of their workforce and ability to respond to anything at all,” Huang said.
ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.
(LONDON) — Europe saw the highest number of measles cases last year in more than 25 years, according to a new report published Thursday from the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF.
There were an estimated 127,350 measles cases in the European region last year, which is double the number of cases for 2023 and the highest number since 1997. The region consists of 53 countries in Europe and Central Asia.
Children under 5 years old accounted for more than 40% of cases in the region, and more than half of the cases required hospitalization, according to the report. Additionally, a total of 38 deaths were reported based on preliminary numbers.
The European region accounted for one-third of all measles cases globally last year, with 500,000 people missing their first dose of the measles vaccine.
“Measles is back, and it’s a wake-up call. Without high vaccination rates, there is no health security,” Dr. Hans P. Kluge, WHO Regional Director for Europe, said in a press release. “As we shape our new regional health strategy for Europe and Central Asia, we cannot afford to lose ground. Every country must step up efforts to reach under-vaccinated communities. The measles virus never rests — and neither can we.”
It comes as global vaccination rates for measles have been on the decline since the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a higher number of cases and outbreaks worldwide.
A WHO report published last year found a 20% increase in measles cases between 2022 and 2023 — infecting a total of 10.3 million people globally in the latter year.
More than 22 million children missed their routine measles vaccine in 2023. Only 83% of children received their first measles dose that year, and only 74% received their second dose.
A threshold of 95% vaccination coverage is needed to prevent outbreaks from occurring, according to the WHO.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is dealing with its worst measles outbreak since 2019. More than 250 cases have been reported in an outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, which is close to the 285 total measles cases reported in the entirety of last year nationwide.
Almost all of the cases are in unvaccinated individuals or in individuals whose vaccination status is unknown, health officials said.
Two likely measles deaths have been reported so far in the U.S. One is a confirmed death associated with measles, while the other occurred in a New Mexico resident who tested positive for measles after dying and the cause of death remains under investigation.
The death in Texas of an unvaccinated school-aged child was the first measles death recorded in the U.S. in a decade, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Similarly to global rates, CDC data showed U.S. vaccination rates have been lagging in recent years.
During the 2023–24 school year, just. 92.7% of kindergartners met vaccination requirements for the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine, according to an October 2024 CDC report. The report also found that exemptions from school vaccination requirements increased to 3.3% from 3% the year before.
