A measles outbreak is running rampant in parts of Texas and New Mexico and health officials fear that hundreds more may be infected before it's over. Measles is a highly contagious disease that can usually be prevented by the administration of a vaccine.
As of Tuesday, there were 58 cases of measles reported in the South Plains region of Texas and eight cases reported in eastern New Mexico. The Texas Department of State Health Services reported that 13 people have been hospitalized with the virus. Four of the cases are people who were vaccinated. The remaining cases are people who are unvaccinated, or their vaccination status is unknown. 45 of the cases were reported in one county, Gaines, in Texas. In New Mexico, according to officials, six of the people who have contracted measles are not vaccinated.
"Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease, additional cases are likely to occur in Gaines County and the surrounding communities," the Texas Department of State Health Services stated. 200 to 300 people in the region are suspected to be infected, but most are currently untested.
According to the Associated Press, this is the worst measles outbreak in the state of Texas in almost 30 years. The last time there were this many cases in Texas was in 1996 when 49 were infected.
CNN reports that in Gaines County, where the measles outbreak is the largest, nearly 1 in 5 incoming kindergartners in the 2023-24 school year did not get the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Prior to the introduction of the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine in 1963, there were approximately 3 million to 4 million cases per year with around 48,000 per year requiring hospitalization. Since the year 2000, the number of cases in the United States has ranged from a low of 37 in 2004 to a high of 1,282 in 2019, a majority of which occurred in New York state, especially in densely-populated New York City.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that people with measles are considered to be contagious from four days before to four days after a rash appears, however, sometimes immunocompromised patients do not develop the rash. Measles infections can also cause "immune amnesia," which makes people more vulnerable to other illnesses.
The virus is transmitted by direct contact with infectious droplets or is spread airborne when an infected person breathes, coughs, or sneezes. Measles can remain infectious in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves an area. Up to 9 out of 10 susceptible people with close contact to a measles patient will develop measles.
This past weekend, hundreds of staff members under the Department of Health and Human Services responsibility, including with the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the CDC, were given termination notices by order of the Trump administration. These firings occurred just as a White House-delayed CDC study suggested undetected bird flu, which has developed into multiple never-before-seen strains this year, is spreading among humans.