Texas measles cases rise to 146 in an outbreak that led to a child's death
The number of cases — Texas' largest in nearly 30 years — increased by 22 since Tuesday. The Texas Department of State Health Services said cases span over nine counties in Texas, including almost 100 in Gaines County, and 20 patients have been hospitalized.
The child who died Tuesday night in the outbreak is the first U.S. death from the highly contagious but preventable respiratory disease since 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The child was treated at Covenant Children's Hospital in Lubbock, though the facility said the patient didn't live in Lubbock County.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation's top health official and a vaccine critic, said this week that the U.S. Department of the Health and Human Services was watching cases but dismissed the outbreak as 'not unusual.'
The virus has largely spread through rural, oil rig-dotted West Texas, with cases concentrated in a 'close-knit, undervaccinated' Mennonite community , state health department spokesperson Lara Anton has said.
Gaines County has a strong homeschooling and private school community. It is also home to one of the highest rates of school-aged children in Texas who have opted out of at least one required vaccine, with nearly 14% skipping a required dose last school year.
Texas law allows children to get an exemption from school vaccines for reasons of conscience, including religious beliefs. Anton has said the number of unvaccinated kids in Gaines County is likely significantly higher because homeschooled children's data would not be reported.
The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is safe and highly effective at preventing infection and severe cases. The first shot is recommended for children ages 12 to 15 months, and the second for ages 4 to 6 years. Most kids will recover from measles, but infection can lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death.
Vaccination rates have declined nationwide since the COVID-19 pandemic, and most states are below the 95% vaccination threshold for kindergartners — the level needed to protect communities against measles outbreaks.
The U.S. had considered measles, a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours, eliminated in 2000, which meant there had been a halt in continuous spread of the disease for at least a year. Measles cases rose in 2024, including a Chicago outbreak that sickened more than 60 .
Eastern New Mexico has nine cases of measles currently, but the state health department said there is no connection to the outbreak in West Texas.
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‘Is it the dying kind?'
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That gave me the courage — if you can call it that — to finally say the dreaded c-word. I slipped it into the middle of a game of Sorry! like it was just another move. I'm not sure exactly how I said it. I was nervous — the only time I'd ever felt that way talking to O — and the words came out awkwardly. I do remember that what I said didn't seem to register. 'Cancer' meant nothing to him. Mine was his first. I wondered how much of my circumstances he was absorbing. Life, at least for him, seemed to have returned to normal. Then, one night while I was tucking him in, O, who was a master at avoiding uncomfortable conversations, surprised me by asking, 'Why do you go to so many doctors now?' We talked about how, even though I looked and felt mostly fine, my body couldn't fight off bugs as well as his and that I needed a lot of doctor visits to help me get better. I asked what he thought about wearing a mask at school, especially during sick season. 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He said nothing, and for the rest of the evening he played with unusual intensity, forcing laughter — the kind that seemed meant to drown out whatever else was there. I wondered if the perfect book could help. O treasures his books. But none of the ones I could find about illness felt right. If anything, I feared they'd make him feel worse. So, in a burst of steroid-fueled arrogance, I decided to write one myself, a story where the father actually said all the right things. I rewrote obsessively, dreaming about blue whales (O loves whales) in New York City subways. Finally, I landed on a story I believed would work for him. But the magic for O was in a physical book itself — choosing one from the library, getting lost in the illustrations, finding the perfect spot for it on his shelf. I later learned, though, that it might be a year or two before the book I was writing would be published. By then, O might not even care about whales. Then again, what if O was actually doing fine? Aren't kids supposed to be resilient? Yes, he now wore a mask to school, and we couldn't go on our beloved weekend subway adventures anymore. And I could no longer be his sick buddy when he was having tough nights. But he adjusted so quickly — maybe he just thought this was normal now that he was 6. Recently, O revealed that he'd been concocting a grand imaginary scheme to trap his mom. It started with a birdcage and escalated into locking her at the top of a tall tower with no door and no stairs. Then he decided he'd give her medicine to 'make her a little sick' and might need to build a coffin in case something went wrong. 'I am not sure I like this game,' my wife said. O, who'd presented his plan with good humor and without a hint of malice, said, 'I already made a plan in my calendar.' Maybe I should hold off on reading more Brothers Grimm to him, but I suspect it's his way of working through some complex feelings. On my next designated steroid day, I started writing a new book for O based on his wild scheme. If he could go into an imaginary world to control sickness and death, so could I. Through this circus of Nerf baseball and Band-Aids and tales of whales and birdcages, I had been so focused on how I would tell O that I had lost sight of what I was actually trying to say. I wrote this piece to try and figure it out. If this were an after-school special, I'd probably realize that all I really wanted to tell him was that I love him and I just had to find the right way to do it. Or that I had more to learn from him than he did from me. That is not where this landed, though. I finally know what I've been trying to say all along, but how the hell do I tell him I'm sorry?
