ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) – The number of measles cases in the U.S. has surpassed the record-breaking tally for all of 2025, with five more months of 2026 still to come.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged 2,318 cases of measles as of Thursday, according to an agency update on Friday.<\/p>\n
The nation had 2,289 cases in 2025, the worst year for measles in more than three decades. Now, 2026 has easily become the U.S.\u2019s worst year for measles since 1991, as major outbreaks in South Carolina, Utah and Arizona have sickened hundreds and smaller clusters of cases sparked in other states.<\/p>\n
In November, international health officials will meet to determine if the U.S. and Mexico have lost their measles-free status. The U.S. eliminated local measles spread in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, which have fallen in recent years to below the 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks. While measles cases in the U.S. are climbing, it may be impossible to say exactly how far-reaching the spread is. Public health departments and disease researchers have long acknowledged that official counts are incomplete, because some people get sick and don\u2019t seek out treatment \u2014 something not unique to measles.<\/p>\n Furthermore, experts say the spread might be greater than what\u2019s known because the virus is one of the most contagious known to medicine and vaccination rates nationwide have declined. National vaccination rates for measles, mumps and rubella \u2014 which dropped to 92.5% among kindergartners in the 2024-25 school year, from 95.2% in 2019-20 \u2014 obscure even lower rates in certain communities.<\/p>\n In Utah, where public health officials have fought measles for more than a year, the virus has sickened more than 700 people during that time, according to the state health department. Experts relying on mathematical modeling and genetic analyses indicate that a large outbreak on the Utah-Arizona border could be around three to four times bigger than what\u2019s currently known, state epidemiologist Dr. Leisha Nolen said.<\/p>\n The picture is muddier in South Carolina, which had the nation\u2019s largest outbreak in 35 years. There, the 997 total is likely an undercount, the state health department has said, but it doesn\u2019t know by how much.<\/p>\n Dr. Brannon Traxler, acting director of the state department of health, said the undercount is \u201cimpossible to know and may vary during the course of an outbreak.\u201d<\/p>\n Data gaps can make it hard to reliably estimate an outbreak\u2019s true scope. Experts say hospitalization rates can be a good barometer, but measles hospitalizations are not required to be reported in every state.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we really had some kind of solid gold standard for the percentage of all cases that have hospitalization or some measure of severity, then that would be another way of estimating the outbreak size that we could see if it\u2019s consistent with these other methods,\u201d said Damon Toth, an applied mathematician at the University of Utah\u2019s medical school who is working on one of the Utah outbreak analyses. In Texas, researchers are still working to estimate the size of the state\u2019s 2025 outbreak and early findings show it might have been nearly twice the size of the 762 known cases.<\/p>\n R\u00e9my Pasco, a mathematical epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who is working on the analysis, said the undercounts were unsurprising. In the absence of an adequate community vaccination rate \u2014 95% according to health experts \u2014 \u201cthere\u2019s just not much you can do about measles once you have it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The CDC defines an outbreak as three or more linked cases. But by the time three such cases are identified in communities with low vaccination rates and less disease surveillance, \u201ceither you missed the previous ones or you\u2019re going to have a lot more,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Dr. Varun Shetty, Texas\u2019 chief state epidemiologist, said there were instances where people tested positive for measles but health officials couldn\u2019t confirm who else was in the person\u2019s household or if they were sick.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat we\u2019re able to count and report is almost always an underestimate of what actually occurred, because it relies on people being willing to be able to get tested, to share information with healthcare providers and with public health,\u201d Shetty said. \u201cSometimes that just doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d<\/p>\n The state health department previously reported that 182 probable measles cases went unconfirmed in March 2025 among minors in Gaines County \u2014 the epicenter of the outbreak \u2014 due to a lack of information. The confirmed case count for the western Texas county for the whole outbreak is 414.<\/p>\n Shetty expects to keep seeing measles cases and even outbreaks because so many people are unprotected.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really critical, not only for individual people, but for communities, to have high vaccination coverage,\u201d he said. Dr. Mark Roberts, retired director of the Public Health Dynamics Lab at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, worries most for the people he calls \u201cinnocent bystanders.\u201d<\/p>\n Research and measles modeling by his team shows those who cannot get vaccinated \u2014 young babies, people with weak immune systems and those who rarely don\u2019t get robust immunity from the vaccine \u2014 bear the brunt of outbreaks early on.<\/p>\n Some people see skipping vaccination as like deciding not to wear a seat belt in a car, Roberts said.<\/p>\n \u201cNot vaccinating your kid is like saying, \u2018I don\u2019t want my car to have brakes,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cBecause it\u2019s other people that you can hit. It\u2019s not just you in your car. It\u2019s other people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ATLANTA, Ga. (AP) – The number of measles cases in the U.S. has surpassed the record-breaking tally for all of 2025, with five more months of 2026 still to come. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention logged 2,318 cases of measles as of Thursday, according to an agency update on Friday. The nation … Continue reading There are already more US measles cases this year than in all of 2025<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1527812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-state-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-26 15:29:20","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1527812"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527812\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1527813,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1527812\/revisions\/1527813"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1527812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1527812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1527812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMeasles cases are undercounted<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nResearchers are still analyzing the 2025 Texas outbreak<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nVaccination is about protecting others, physician says<\/strong><\/p>\n