First Measles Death Reported in Growing Outbreak
The Texas Department of Health Services (TDSHS) has announced the “first fatality in a growing measles outbreak in the western part of the state, in an unvaccinated, school-age child.” CIDRAP has the news.
The case count in Texas remains at 124, and most cases have been identified in children. The TDSHS emphasized that measles is a “highly contagious respiratory illness” that can cause “life-threatening illness.” About “one in five people who get sick will need hospital care and one in 20 will develop pneumonia,” and rarely, “measles can lead to swelling of the brain and death.”
Measles was eliminated in the U.S. 25 years ago, but “dropping vaccination rates due to anti-vaccine advocacy groups erroneously linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, has left some communities vulnerable to outbreaks.” The outbreaks now are “largely occurring among unvaccinated or under-vaccinated members of a Mennonite community, a TDSHS spokesperson told the Associated Press.”
Measles case numbers had risen by 2019, but dropped during the first three years of the COVID-19 pandemic before rising again in 2024. During the 2019-2020 school year, “95.2% of eligible kindergarten students in the US were vaccinated against measles, according to the CDC. That percentage has dropped to 92.7% in the 2023–2024 school year, leaving approximately 280,000 kindergartners at risk during the 2023–2024 school year.” The disease is also highly contagious – about “90% of unvaccinated people will contract the virus if exposed.”
Our sister publication, Healthcare Purchasing News, has previously reported on the measles outbreak.
Matt MacKenzie is Associate Editor of Healthcare Purchasing News and a contributor to Healthcare Innovation.
