The United States registered three measles in the first 24 years of this century. In just over three months of 2025, it has equated that number. The most recent patient, an 8-year-old non-vaccinated and previously healthy girl in West-Texas, died at the end of last week.
Experts of infectious diseases warn that the days that the dead in the United States were ultra rare are for the time being.
With vaccination percentages in parts of the country and a long-term critic of the measles, mumps and rubella-vaccine-Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-as the most important health officer of the country, interviewed by Stat, warned that the country may be on a process where increasingly greater lags will be deadly.
“My concern is that this will be a new normal for us,” says Peter Honez, an expert of infectious diseases and vaccine developer to Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
Peter Marks, the recently expelled top vaccines regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, threw the prospects in grim terms.
“Unless we change the course dramatically, change the course drastically, it becomes a problem,” he said Stat in an interview. “This is what Mazles does.”
Two of the dead that have been admitted this year so far have been confirmed; Both were previously healthy non -vaccinated children who lived in a Mennonite community in West -Texas. The third death, in a non -vaccinated adult in New Mexico, has still been considered so far A surveyed caseAlthough the individual tested positively for measles after death.
“With two, perhaps three people, I don’t think it’s unbelievable that we’ll see more,” said Caitlin Rivers, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. “The more cases there are, the more opportunities are that some of those cases will be serious.”
In a post About the last death on the social media site X, Kennedy – the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services – said that from Sunday 642 had been confirmed cases in 22 states in 2025, almost 500 of them in Texas.
The number of confirmed cases – most certainly an underestimation, because in some communities parents have tested the opposition to sick children – it is two highest annual count because measles were declared in the United States in 2000. And the year is still young.
Experts already estimate that the elimination status of the country, which reached the country in 2000, is in danger. Measles -free status means that the measles virus does not circulate in a country in a routine way; All cases are contracted abroad or linked to the distribution of someone who is infected elsewhere. But if an outbreak continues for more than a year, the virus is again considered endemic.
The US almost lost the elimination status of its measles in 2019 as a result of a long -term outbreak in New York City and the surrounding provinces. At the time, the then President Donald Trump and Robert Redfield, his director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insisted on parents to have their children vaccinated. But so far this year, Trump has been quiet about the issue with which CDC director – and director nominated – Susan Monarez has said nothing, and Kennedy’s approval of vaccination has been at his best luke.
On Sunday, after attending the funeral of the 8-year-old who died, he published a post on X with what is seen as his most positive explanation about the measles vaccine so far: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine.” But he stopped insisting parents of non -vaccinated children to let their children inoculate, and he suggested that the growth of new things and hospital admissions had been flattened.
Marks, who noticed that cases in Texas increased considerably last week, challenged that claim. “I don’t know, an increase of 26% in a week … that is not flattened,” he said. “It is a way to reduce the concern that this outbreak can possibly maintain.”
Stat contacted HHS on Sunday to ask if Kennedy would argue more powerfully for measles vaccination, given the last death. In an e -mailed comment at the end of Sunday, Emily Hilliard, the deputy press of the department, pointed to Kennedy’s Social Media Post.
Measles were common in the United States in the past and they are still in some parts of the world. The World Health Organization estimated that in 2023- the most recent year for which it has figures- there were more than 100,000 measles worldwide deaths, most of them under 5 years of older or under vaccinated children (measles vaccination requires two doses.)
Before measles vaccination widespread in the United States, around 400 to 500 children died a year from the disease. While most children recover, some people develop pneumonia and others encephalitis, inflammation of the brain. In rare cases, a person who had measles will develop a condition that is mentioned years later Subacute Sclerosing PanencefalitisKnown by the acronym SSPE. A progressive infection of the central nervous system, it is always fatal.
Kathryn Edwards, an expert of infectious diseases and emeritus professor of Vanderbilt University, said she is worried that more cases of measles means that there can be more cases of SSPE on the horizon of the country. She noted that children who contract measles when they are very young – younger than 12 months – have an estimated risk of developing SSPE from one in 1,000 cases.
Children younger than 12 months are usually not vaccinated against measles, because antibodies they get in the womb of their mothers – if their mothers had been vaccinated or measured – prevent the vaccine from inducing a protective response. The first dose is generally given after the first birthday of a child, where the second is administered before the child starts to school.
In the outbreak institutions, however, some public health departments will recommend vaccination of each child older than 6 months, as long as there is no medical reason for them not to be vaccinated. (Some immunocomromitated children are not allowed to receive the measles vaccine.)
“We have not seen SSPE for a number of years and that is something else … that could probably come,” said Edwards in an interview and noted that Kennedy did not mention that risk.
William Moss, a professor in epidemiology at Bloomberg School of Public Health of Johns Hopkins University, suggested that the soil is fertile in the US for long -term outbreaks, with a growing number of communities where vaccination percentages are lower than the 95% threshold to prevent measles. Many of these communities are interconnected, as has been the case with the outbreak of West Texas, which has fueled satellite outbreaks in New Mexico, Kansas and Oklahoma.
“The fact that this was an 8-year-old girl means that this outbreak has been in the making for years because of under-vaccination,” said Moss. “And they got away with it because there were no imports in that community. And I am sure there are many communities in the United States that just wait a bit, if you want, for an import [of the virus]. “
“But now that they have a constant outbreak, the message must be strong and clear, and it just does not come, at least from the federal government, that not -vaccinated children should be vaccinated,” he said. “It is difficult to know how many deaths it will cost before people realize the importance of this.”
Marks agreed. “Our children in the United States deserve better. We owe them the best care. And in this case the best care we have to have them vaccinated.”
Asked if there are more measles deaths in the future of the country, Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine in favor in Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, suggested that it will depend on how the dead are viewed so far.
“It depends on whether we find these deaths so terrible that we realize that we have made a huge mistake, a huge mistake by choosing not to vaccinate our children,” he said. “Assuming you do not have a medical contra indication, then there is no good reason not to vaccinate your child.”