The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its national measles tally late Monday to include an additional death in 2026, raising the total to two. The agency’s numbers are still shy of Pennsylvania’s official report of four measles-associated deaths in an outbreak that surpassed 900 cases this week. The CDC’s database does not… Source link
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Following America’s recent measles deaths, anti-vaccine activists have cast doubt on the virus as the culprit. They’ve pointed to a victim’s underlying health conditions or, as they did last year in Texas, blamed hospital error. But the two latest measles deaths in Pennsylvania—bringing the state’s total to four since mid-August—have made the United States’ measles crisis undeniable. Last month, the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two measles-associated deaths; both cases were later revealed to be infants too young to have been vaccinated. In response, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who was an anti-vaccine activist for decades before becoming health secretary—wrote on X that the deaths might have been “altogether fabricated.” (He later acknowledged a coroner’s conclusion that one of the deaths had been caused by measles.) Then, last weekend, an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman died in Jefferson County; immediately, people on Reddit and X insisted that her death wasn’t really caused by measles, because she’d had asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary …
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has acknowledged that measles caused the death of a Pennsylvania infant, days after reports revealed that he asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove two deaths in the state from its national measles tally. Kennedy said Friday that the Lancaster County coroner had determined measles caused the death of a 6-week-old infant in August. “The facts emerging now demonstrate why CDC waited for the evidence rather than allowing political grandstanding to dictate its reporting,” Kennedy wrote on social media. The facts emerging now demonstrate why CDC waited for the evidence rather than allowing political grandstanding to dictate its reporting. Governor Shapiro, by contrast, politicized these two tragic deaths before the underlying causes had been established. The Lancaster County… https://t.co/VnXuAoMM3C — Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) September 4, 2026 The acknowledgment comes after Reuters reported that Kennedy directed CDC Director Erica Schwartz to remove references to two Pennsylvania deaths from the agency’s national measles count after questioning whether the disease contributed to them. CDC staff had previously accepted Pennsylvania’s …
The number of U.S. measles cases in 2026 has now exceeded 2,000, quickly approaching the full annual total of last year. As of June 4, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has confirmed 2,030 cases so far this year, with 93 percent — or 1,890 cases — associated with outbreaks. Throughout all of… Source link
Gamblers are increasingly placing bets on the number of people infected with measles in the US. Since January alone, nearly $9 million dollars have been bet on future cases of the disease on prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket – and there is some evidence that the predictions are accurate enough to be useful for modelling its spread. Prediction markets involve buying and selling shares related to an outcome. Each market offers a question about future events and the option to bet “yes” or “no”, with the cost of a bet determined by the way others have bet. For example, if 86 per cent of wagers on a given future event are “yes” bets, the cost of a “yes” share is 86 cents. If that event does in fact occur, successful gamblers receive $1 for every share they have bought, with the unsuccessful gamblers – who lose their money – footing the bill for the winnings. The idea of prediction markets emerged from scientific research. In 1988, three economists at the University of Iowa – Robert …
Measles has made a major comeback in the U.S. and the pace of infections does not seem to be slowing any time soon. Already, the country is on track to surpass last year’s number of measles infections. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated data indicating that the U.S. total has reached more than 1,600 measles infections as of April 3, 2026. Last year, the CDC confirmed 2,286 measles cases for all of 2025, the highest number of cases since 1991, but we’re already on track to beat that record. What’s more, the Trump administration has pushed a key review of the country’s measles-free status until after the midterm elections. According to the CDC report, 17 new outbreaks were reported in 2026. Notably, 94 percent of confirmed cases are “outbreak-associated,” with a majority of cases stemming from outbreaks that started in 2025. An estimated 5 percent of cases have required hospital care already this year; in 2025, 11 percent required hospital care. No deaths have yet been attributed to measles in 2026, but …
Out of the 30 states where measles has been detected in 2026, Florida currently ranks third in case counts. Since the start of the year, at least 132 confirmed or probable cases of measles have been reported across the state, where vaccination rates have consistently fallen below the threshold required to prevent outbreaks. The measles situation in Florida is, in other words, an urgent problem for the state that the state should be urgently addressing. But on all things measles, the state’s health department has been mostly silent. The department’s measles landing page has no map of the state’s cases and no list of vaccination sites; its “Data and Statistics” section points to measles numbers that were last updated in 2024. In the months that measles has been spreading in the state, health officials have not issued press releases about the virus or launched information campaigns to caution residents about the risks. They have not publicly advertised the benefits of vaccines. Many of Florida’s health experts remain in the dark about their own state: “There …
Of every 1,000 people the measles virus infects, it may kill as few as one to three. In a way, this can seem merciful. But the mathematics of measles is also unforgiving. The virus is estimated to infect roughly 90 percent of the unimmunized people it encounters; each infected person may pass the infection on to as many as 12 to 18 others. In large part owing to an ongoing outbreak in South Carolina, the United States is watching those risks unfold in real time. As of last Thursday, the CDC is reporting 982 cases of measles. That count is expected to break 1,000 this week; a tracker run by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that many experts consider more reliable has ticked past 1,000 already. By the numbers alone, another death seems inevitable, and inevitable soon. Probabilities aren’t guarantees, of course. So far, 2026 may be seeing some improvements over 2025, when the U.S. documented more than 2,200 measles cases—more than in any year since 1991. This year, just 4 percent of measles cases …
The birthday-party invitation said “siblings welcome,” which means you can bring your 11-month-old son while your husband is out of town. You arrive a little disheveled and a little late. Your 5-year-old daughter rushes into the living room, and you make your way to the kitchen, wearing your son in a sling. You find a few moms around a table arrayed with plates of fruit, hummus, celery sticks, and carrots—no gluten, no nuts, no Red 40. These parents care about avoiding pesticides, screen time, and processed foods, and you do too. It’s a classic kids’ party: Tears and lemonade are spilled; mud and cake get smeared into the rug; confetti balloons are popped one by one, showering elated children in rainbow-paper flakes. Sunbeams through the windows illuminate floating dust motes—and, imperceptibly, microdroplets of mucus carrying the measles virus, expelled from an infected but asymptomatic child who is hopping and laughing among the others. Your daughter breathes that same air, inhaling the virus directly into her respiratory tract. The infected aerosolized droplets will linger in the …
After all, wastewater contains saliva, urine, feces, shed skin, and more. You could consider it a rich biological sample. Wastewater analysis helped scientists understand how covid was spreading during the pandemic. It’s early days, but it is starting to help us get a handle on measles. Globally, there has been some progress toward eliminating measles, largely thanks to vaccination efforts. Such efforts led to an 88% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2024, according to the World Health Organization. It estimates that “nearly 59 million lives have been saved by the measles vaccine” since 2000. Still, an estimated 95,000 people died from measles in 2024 alone—most of them young children. And cases are surging in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Eastern Mediterranean region. Last year, the US saw the highest levels of measles in decades. The country is on track to lose its measles elimination status—a sorry fate that met Canada in November after the country recorded over 5,000 cases in a little over a year. Public health efforts to contain the spread of …
