9 hours ago
‘I Feel Like I've Been Lied To': When a Measles Outbreak Hits Home
He was a chiropractor by training, but in a remote part of West Texas with limited medical care, Kiley Timmons had become a first stop for whatever hurt. Ear infections. Labor pains. Oil workers who arrived with broken ribs and farmers with bulging discs. For more than a decade, Kiley, 48, had seen 20 patients each day at his small clinic located between a church and a gas station in Brownfield, population 8,500. He treated what he could, referred others to physicians and prayed over the rest.
It wasn't until early this spring that he started to notice something unfamiliar coming through the door: aches that lingered, fevers that wouldn't break, discolored patches of skin that didn't make sense. At first, he blamed it on a bad flu season, but the symptoms stuck around and then multiplied. By late March, a third of his patients were telling him about relatives who couldn't breathe. And then Kiley started coughing, too.
His wife, Carrollyn, had recently tested positive for Covid, but her symptoms eased as Kiley's intensified. He went to a doctor at the beginning of April for a viral panel, but every result came back negative. The doctor decided to test for the remote possibility of measles, since there was a large outbreak spreading through a Mennonite community 40 miles away, but Kiley was vaccinated.
'I feel like I'm dying,' Kiley texted a friend. He couldn't hold down food or water. He had already lost 10 pounds. His chest went numb, and his arms began to tingle. His oxygen was dropping dangerously low when he finally got the results.
'Positive for measles,' he wrote to his sister, in mid-April. 'Just miserable. I can't believe this.'
Twenty-five years after measles was officially declared eliminated from the United States, this spring marked a harrowing time of rediscovery. A cluster of cases that began at a Mennonite church in West Texas expanded into one of the largest outbreaks in a generation, spreading through communities with declining vaccination rates as three people died and dozens more were hospitalized from Mexico to North Dakota. Public health officials tracked about 1,200 confirmed cases and countless exposures across more than 30 states. People who were contagious with measles boarded domestic flights, shopped at Walmart, played tuba in a town parade and toured the Mall of America.
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