\n\tThat was, in some respects, to be expected. After a 2019 outbreak in West Texas, a couple more confirmed cases in the South in 2023, and given that neighboring counties\u2019 school districts have some of the highest vaccine exemption rates in the state \u201413 times the national average \u2014 Eby has gotten used to keeping the potentially life-threatening virus on his radar.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s always at the back of your mind,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut it wasn\u2019t until some local schools started shutting down in the ensuing weeks that Eby realized how bad this outbreak could get. Something felt off to the pediatrician \u2014 he says that, at the time, he recalls the official case count being a dozen. \u201cThat just tells you how far undercounted the cases were,\u201d Eby says.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the months that followed, more than 750 measles cases were diagnosed \u2014 414 in Gaines County alone. Ninety-nine patients were hospitalized for severe symptoms such as inability to breathe and inflammation in the brain. Two otherwise healthy, stone-cold-normal children died.<\/p>\n
\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n
\n\tTo pediatricians like Eby, the outbreaks meant every typically innocuous symptom in clinic \u2014 every cough or sniffle, every hive or wheal or welt \u2014 put him and his staff on high alert. That\u2019s because measles can start as just a stuffy nose and a red dot on the abdomen, but the illness rapidly evolves into whole-body bumps and blisters accompanied by difficulty breathing. In severe cases, it produces a child so sleepy they can\u2019t be woken up, or seizures that won\u2019t stop, because of swelling in the brain. And it can all happen within days of the itch starting.<\/p>\n
\n\tSo, Eby hasn\u2019t been taking chances. \u201cAll of a sudden, a same-day appointment that\u2019s on the schedule as a cough and rash,\u201d he says, \u201cyou need to ask, \u2018Did anyone clarify?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThat style of medicine \u2014 the kind where a previously largely-forgotten foe was now lurking in the community, in the waiting room, and in doctors\u2019 minds \u2014 also felt a bit like a step back in time, Eby says. At various points during the outbreak, he found himself thinking, \u201cIs every kid going to have measles for the next couple weeks?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThat style of medicine is also becoming the norm, and not just in Texas. Even as attention has turned elsewhere \u2014 shutdowns, boat strikes, Epstein \u2014 the measles outbreak continues to rage throughout the country.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs of Dec. 2, almost 2,000 cases have been confirmed across 43 states. (The Centers for Disease Control is not publicly sharing the number of so-called probable cases \u2014 ones that were not tested. During previous international outbreaks, between 10 percent and 70 percent of cases were not tested.) That number is the highest in the United States since 1992. And after a summer lull, cases are climbing again: The week before Thanksgiving, the number of cases was the highest since May.<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n
\n\tShould the spikes continue into January, the U.S. will lose its \u201cmeasles-free\u201d designation from the World Health Organization \u2014 a label achieved in 2000. That\u2019s part of a larger trend: In November, the WHO stripped the Americas of its measles-free label amid historic outbreaks in both Canada and Mexico. (Mexican officials say their outbreak was seeded from Texas; Canadian officials say theirs started with an \u201cinternationally imported\u201d case, but did not specify whether it was American.)<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThis loss represents a setback,\u201d Jarbas Barbosa, director of the Pan American Health Organization, the region\u2019s WHO oversight body, said of removing the measles-free label. \u201cWe call on all countries to redouble their efforts to strengthen vaccination<\/a> rates, surveillance, and timely response to suspected cases. Cooperation, solidarity, and science are stronger than any virus.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTo some domestic public health officials, the issue isn\u2019t just that the outbreaks are a step backward. It\u2019s that they\u2019re entirely preventable.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cLife has enough curveballs and trauma that to have a tragedy like someone passing away from a completely preventable disease \u2014 that\u2019s just hard to believe,\u201d James McDonald, pediatrician and commissioner of the New York Department of Health, says.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s not just measles. Cases of whooping cough increased sixfold between 2023 and 2024, above pre-pandemic highs. Hospitalizations from flu this past year were at the highest rates in more than a decade. In 2024, almost 4,000 infants were born with syphilis infections \u2014 a figure eight times higher than the 2015 number. \u201cWe\u2019re still dealing with things that First World nations shouldn\u2019t even be talking about,\u201d McDonald says.<\/p>\n \n\tBut under the current Trump administration, health officials say, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from under them \u2014 from under public health, as an institution.<\/p>\n \n\tThere have been the obvious, explicitly damaging measures. Take, for instance, the administration\u2019s all-out assault on vaccines, which most recently, in early December, led the CDC\u2019s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to nix the decades-long recommendation to immunize all newborns against hepatitis B. The same day, a presidential memo directed Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.<\/a> to \u201creview best practices\u201d related to vaccines and update the childhood immunization schedule accordingly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThere have also been less obvious measures. Billions of dollars in cuts to the CDC, buried in the fine print of federal budgets. Billions more public health dollars to states clawed back, hidden in cases winding their way through the federal courts. Mass layoffs to the epidemiologists, and lab workers \u00a0and data collectors responsible for responding to, diagnosing, and tracking disease outbreaks in real time.<\/p>\n \n\tTaken together, experts worry that the steps to hamstring the CDC (and other state departments) have imperiled the public\u2019s health for political purposes. These actions are \u201cseeding doubt \u2026[and] hijacking resources away from families\u2026[with] significant consequences,\u201d says Susan Kressly, pediatrician and president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the meantime, the measles outbreak is \u201ccontinuing to grow,\u201d she adds, \u201cwith no end in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\tCode Lavender\t<\/p>\n \n\tSomewhere in Lubbock, Texas, stashed away in the corner of a hospital closet, there\u2019s a cart stocked to the teeth with lavender-scented products. There are rollerballs and brushes. There are sachets and steamers. There are lavender-colored journals and pens, too.<\/p>\n \n\tThe cart \u2014 and the team of counselors, chaplains, peer coaches, and therapy dogs that accompany it \u2014 was borne out of necessity during the Covid pandemic, says Shannon Bates, chief nursing officer at Covenant Children\u2019s Hospital. The goal, she says, was to use aromatherapy, reflection, dialogue, and community to combat the \u201csecondary trauma response\u201d associated with death after death from that virus.<\/p>\n \n\tFor a while after the height of the pandemic, the cart got less mileage. But during the measles outbreak, the Covenant team has been pulling it out again. That\u2019s partially because, in some ways, the script has flipped on clinical staff. With the unavoidable, politically charged conversations around vaccines that accompany the outbreak, \u201cit\u2019s kind of the opposite of Covid, where everyone was the health-care hero,\u201d Bates says. \u201cNow, you\u2019re seen as the bad guy, the one who can\u2019t be trusted.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s also because, in addition to staff enduring rhetoric around health workers that\u2019s ranged from distrust to resentment, they\u2019ve witnessed firsthand just how harmful the measles outbreak can be. In February, a six-year-old girl died after being admitted to Covenant \u2014 the nation\u2019s first death from the outbreak. That \u201cdefinitely has taken a toll on staff,\u201d Bates says. Since then, she adds, \u201cwe have done some proactive rounding.\u201d In other words, rather than waiting for someone to ask for a rollerball or a sachet, they\u2019ve taken to roaming the halls with the cart, the chaplains, and the puppies.<\/p>\n \n\tSummer Davies also recalls the start of the outbreak, when the first call came in. It was the early afternoon, just after the team finished rounding. Davies, a pediatrician and associate professor at Texas Tech University, was patched through to a doctor who told her the child had a fever, and a rash, and needed to be admitted precautionarily. \u201cI remember thinking at the time, \u2018I don\u2019t know, maybe it\u2019s not measles,\u2019\u201d Davies says. That changed within moments of seeing just how sick the child was.<\/p>\n \n\tDavies was there when the six-year-old died, too \u2014 an experience she calls \u201cdevastating.\u201d The death stuck with her: Long after it happened, she and her colleagues wondered, \u201cCould we have done something different to help that child?\u201d<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t \t\t\t\t\tLast spring, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s Make America Healthy Again Commission recommended reassessing the nation\u2019s childhood vaccine schedule.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tChip Somodevilla\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \n\tAmid the circumstances, Davies says her hospital, as well as the county and state public health departments, was incredibly supportive. \u201cWe have had people\u2026advocating for us, taking all of the right steps, making sure we\u2019re safe and that patients are safe,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \n\tOff the wards, though, things were harder.<\/p>\n \n\tAs the outbreak raged, federal agencies ignored pleas for help<\/a> from Texas officials. \u201cMy staff feels like we are out here all alone,\u201d Katherine Wells, the public health director in Lubbock, wrote in emails obtained by KFF Health News just days after<\/a> children with measles started getting hospitalized. \u201cWe weren\u2019t allowed to do anything,\u201d a CDC official told KFF Health News. It took weeks until any agency officials dispatched to Texas \u2014 at which point HHS pressured them to highlight Vitamin A, rather than vaccines, as a solution to the outbreak. (In multiple interviews since January, Secretary Kennedy has claimed that Vitamin A can reduce measles deaths. Studies have consistently found that the salve demonstrates no effect in the greater than 99 percent of Americans who have adequate levels of the vitamin.)<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAs a health-care professional, that\u2019s scary to hear,\u201d Davies says of being all but abandoned by the federal government. \u201c[But] it makes a big difference to feel supported by your hospital system,\u201d she adds, \u201cto know that they\u2019re in our corner, if nobody else is.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-rollingstone-2022\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
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