\n The town would soon emerge as the epicenter of the biggest US outbreak in more than 30 years, one that would kill three Americans. But when the virus jumped the border to Mexico<\/a>, a bigger tragedy was about to begin.\n <\/p>\n \n At least 40 Mexicans have died of measles complications since the start of 2025, ranging from babies to middle-age farmworkers, according to the Mexican Health Ministry. More than 17,000 infections have been confirmed in that period, four times the number in the United States. Measles is largely preventable with two shots of a common vaccine. But most of those with infections hadn\u2019t gotten it.\n <\/p>\n \n Mexico\u2019s ongoing measles outbreak offers a case study of what can happen when a country\u2019s vaccine coverage slips. The disease was first identified in the 9-year-old\u2019s neighborhood, in a secluded Mennonite community of apple, wheat and corn farms in Chihuahua state, south of Texas, authorities said. It spread to agricultural laborers, many of them from Indigenous communities.\n <\/p>\n \n By the end of 2025, this Mexican state, roughly the size of Michigan, had confirmed around 4,500 cases<\/a> \u2013 more than in the entire United States.\n <\/p>\n \n Pinning down the movement of a microscopic pathogen can be difficult. But Mexican authorities believe that the measles virus probably arrived in the throat or lungs of the third-grader, who was unvaccinated, and then spread wildly.\n <\/p>\n \n In Chihuahua, officials did genetic tests on more than 100 cases. Each came back with the stamp of the measles virus that popped up in Canada in 2024 and later appeared in Texas: genotype D8 and lineage MVs\/Ontario.CAN\/47.24. The virus has since traveled through Mexico\u2019s 32 states.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cEverything comes from the outbreak in Chihuahua,\u201d said Dr. Miguel Nakamura, director of epidemiological information at Mexico\u2019s Health Ministry.\n <\/p>\n \n In the United States, a series of measles outbreaks starting in Seminole raised concerns about the growing role of vaccine skeptics in the government.\n <\/p>\n \n Mexico\u2019s case is somewhat different. The president, Claudia Sheinbaum, is a leftist with a PhD in engineering who prides herself on her scientific background. What unites the neighboring nations\u2019 outbreaks is something else, epidemiologists say: complacency.\n <\/p>\n \n Measles was declared eliminated in both countries more than a quarter-century ago \u2013 a historic public-health achievement. But Mexico\u2019s once-robust vaccine program has atrophied amid disarray in its government-dominated health system, say epidemiologists.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThis is the paradox,\u201d said Samuel Ponce de Le\u00f3n, an epidemiology professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Thanks to the success of vaccines, \u201cyou don\u2019t see kids with signs of polio or complications from measles, like deafness or meningitis. We stopped having measles cases, so people began to say, \u2018Why should I worry?\u2019\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Measles is one of the most contagious diseases<\/a> in the world, far more so than Covid-19. It\u2019s spread by an infected person coughing, sneezing or even just talking. The virus can hang in the air for up to two hours<\/a>. A single person can potentially infect 18 others<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Many cases are mild. The 9-year-old who returned from Seminole developed a high fever and rash but quickly got better and returned to school, said his mother, who spoke with CNN on the condition of anonymity.\n <\/p>\n \n He lives at the edge of the city of Cuauhtemoc, in a community of around 30,000 Mennonites, a Protestant group known for their piety, hard work and pacifism. The boy\u2019s mother contacted his school when he became ill, saying she thought he might have measles. The principal, Oscar Peters, told CNN that he then reached out to his own doctor, who advised him not to worry. Measles cases were rare.\n <\/p>\n \n A few days later, one of the boy\u2019s Mennonite classmates, Artemio Bergen, an energetic tow-headed boy who loved riding his bike and reading horror stories, came down with a high fever. His parents watched helplessly as the boy lay prostrate, his body aflame; medicine provided no relief. Soon, red blotches were sprouting on his skin.\n <\/p>\n \n At that point, the family sent photos of the boy to his 87-year-old great-grandmother. She panicked. \u201cRun, run to the hospital!\u201d she implored, according to Andr\u00e9s Bergen, the child\u2019s father. Back when the elderly woman was young, her sister had died of measles. She had never forgotten the symptoms.\n <\/p>\n \n Artemio spent a week in the hospital, his parents hovering over him. His fever raged, and he struggled to breathe. \u201cAt a few points, we thought maybe he wouldn\u2019t survive,\u201d his father recalled. There is no antiviral treatment or cure for measles, and doctors generally treat the symptoms or manage complications. Finally, the boy recovered. On February 20, 2025, his parents brought him home, relieved the ordeal was over.\n <\/p>\n \n Then their other three children got sick.\n <\/p>\n \n Measles can lead to serious complications and even death by triggering pneumonia or brain swelling. Bergen quickly realized that the illness was like nothing his kids had had before. One son was so pained by sunlight that his father covered the windows in black plastic. Another went limp. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t even drink water at night by himself,\u201d Bergen recalled.\n <\/p>\n \n The Esperanza (\u201cHope\u201d) Mennonite school, which Artemio attended, has 240 students from kindergarten through high school. It\u2019s a cheerful place, with colorful signs lining its whitewashed halls. \u201cBe the \u2018I\u2019 in KIND,\u201d reads one.\n <\/p>\n \n While Peters\u2019 doctor had minimized the possibility of measles, the principal was concerned. He sent a note to parents warning of \u201csome kind of outbreak.\u201d Soon, one-third of the student body was out sick. Peters suspended classes, but the virus had already moved beyond his schoolyard.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt was a matter of, I think, three or four weeks, and all the schools around had measles,\u201d he recalled. They shut down, too.\n <\/p>\n \n In late March, Iris Ram\u00edrez, a state epidemiological official in the capital city of Chihuahua, 65 miles to the east, noticed something strange. Store clerks were coming down with measles. She said she soon made the connection: Mennonites from Cuauhtemoc traveled to Chihuahua on weekends to shop at Costco, Sam\u2019s Club and other megastores. The virus came with them.\n <\/p>\n \n Measles quickly started circulating beyond Mennonites. Their farmhands played a key role in its spread, said Nakamura, the federal health official. Many were Indigenous seasonal laborers who came from poor, remote mountain villages with low vaccination rates.\n <\/p>\n \n The first to die in Cuauhtemoc\u2019s measles outbreak was a 46-year-old Indigenous farmworker who was living not far from the Bergens\u2019 house, regional health officials say. In early June, a 4-year-old girl died, the daughter of an Indigenous laborer in another Mennonite neighborhood. In addition to their lack of vaccines, some of the Indigenous suffered from malnutrition and other complicating factors for measles, the health officials said.\n <\/p>\n \n By the end of the year, the epidemic in Chihuahua state finally ebbed. But it had killed 21 people, 17 of them Indigenous.\n <\/p>\n \n And the virus was taking off elsewhere in Mexico.\n <\/p>\n \n Measles is so virulent that at least 95% of a community needs to be vaccinated<\/a> with two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to avoid its spread, according to the World Health Organization.\n <\/p>\n \n Anti-vaccine information had spread in recent years to many parts of Texas. Seminole, a mostly Mennonite town of 7,000 in Gaines County, was no exception.\n <\/p>\n \n About 77% of kindergarteners in the county were reported to have received the measles shot for the 2024-25 school year, according to state records.\n <\/p>\n \n The Mennonite faith doesn\u2019t prohibit vaccines. But the communities are often reclusive, with residents speaking Low German and keeping their distance from authorities.\n <\/p>\n \n The 9-year-old boy\u2019s mother didn\u2019t hear anything about measles during their family visit to Texas in January 2025, she said, and their relatives showed no sign of illness.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t know if we got it from Walmart\u201d during a shopping outing, the mother said.\n <\/p>\n \n But after the family left Seminole, the virus exploded. In the following months, more than 760 people in the Texas<\/a> town were infected, and 99 were hospitalized<\/a>, according to the state health department. Two girls died. (An unvaccinated New Mexico man who also died tested positive for measles, in a related outbreak.)\n <\/p>\n \n Mennonites may be insular, but they\u2019re also globalized. Families in the U.S. communities maintain close contact with relatives in Mexico and Canada. Anti-vaccine claims travel the same highways.\n <\/p>\n \n Dr. Alexis Hern\u00e1ndez, the top state health official in Cuauhtemoc, recalled his employees\u2019 surprise when they started knocking on Mennonites\u2019 doors, urging them to get vaccinated. Some refused, holding up printed reports.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey had scientific articles explaining why the vaccine shouldn\u2019t be applied,\u201d he said. \u201cIn English.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In Mexico, however, the problem wasn\u2019t so much ideology as execution.\n <\/p>\n \n Its government follows more conventional public-health policies than the Trump administration, which named a vaccine skeptic \u2013 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. \u2013 secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has issued mixed messages about measles shots, at times recommending them, but on other occasions saying they cause serious \u201cadverse events,\u201d and promoting unproven treatments. (The World Health Organization say the vaccine is safe and effective).\n <\/p>\n \n Mexico had established a top-notch vaccine program<\/a> after a measles pandemic in 1989-90 left more than 8,000 dead. By the late 1990s, measles had been declared eliminated.\n <\/p>\n \n In recent years, however, the vaccine program withered amid cuts in health spending, the Covid pandemic and a botched restructuring of the national medical system.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe government shifted its attention to other things,\u201d said Alejandro Macias, an infectious disease doctor who helped lead the government response to the H1N1 flu pandemic in 2009. \u201cThe truth is, money didn\u2019t flow to vaccines.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In the Chihuahua region, only around two-thirds of 1-year-olds had received their recommended first measles shot in 2024, according to official data. A top state health official, Dr. Hugo Covi\u00e1n, told CNN that the federal government didn\u2019t provide enough vaccines. \u201cIf we don\u2019t have these drugs, of course we can\u2019t reach adequate coverage levels,\u201d he said in an interview.\n <\/p>\n \n Eduardo Clarke, a top federal Health Ministry official, denied that the vaccine budget had shrunk recently. The problem of declining coverage wasn\u2019t a new one, he said, pointing to a study in the science journal Vaccines<\/a> that found a 25% deficit in Mexico\u2019s administration of measles vaccines between 2006 and 2024.\n <\/p>\n \n He dismissed allegations that vaccinations had plummeted under Sheinbaum\u2019s mentor, former President Andr\u00e9s Manuel L\u00f3pez Obrador, whose term ended in 2024, saying that \u201cif true, we would have had millions of cases.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Still, over the years, the vaccination rate had fallen well below the US level, dipping below 80% by 2023, according to the study in Vaccines.\n <\/p>\n \n The real culprit in Mexico\u2019s outbreak isn\u2019t the 9-year-old who traveled to Texas, epidemiologists say. With measles still endemic in many parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and flaring in towns in Canada and the United States, it\u2019s inevitable a traveler will occasionally bring a case home.\n <\/p>\n \n That\u2019s not a big deal in itself, says Dr. Carlos del Rio, a Mexican-born epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf vaccination rates are 96%, there\u2019s no spread,\u201d he said. But even a 90% coverage rate leaves a community exposed to the cruel math of exponential virus growth.\n <\/p>\n \n Officials note that there was limited impact when an unvaccinated 5-year-old girl arrived in the southern state of Oaxaca in January 2025, carrying a strain of measles common in Asia, where she had traveled.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cFortunately, she ended up in a highly vaccinated community, and the virus only reached a small number of people,\u201d said Nakamura.\n <\/p>\n \n In Cuauhtemoc\u2019s Mennonite neighborhoods, local health officials say, only around 30% were vaccinated when measles arrived. It was like dropping a smoldering cigarette onto a pile of dry leaves.\n <\/p>\n \n Bergen, who runs an agricultural machinery company, recalls getting the measles shots as a child in school. But he decided not to vaccinate Artemio after the boy\u2019s older brother had a bad reaction to lactose in another childhood vaccine.\n <\/p>\n \n The decision didn\u2019t seem risky at the time, he recalled. \u201cMeasles was something our grandparents talked about,\u201d he said. It belonged to another era.\n <\/p>\n \n Like other Mexicans, Bergen had also become more distrustful of the medical establishment during the Covid-19 pandemic. \u201cWe saw people who got the vaccine in worse shape than people who didn\u2019t.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n About a half-dozen children at the Esperanza school ended up in the hospital with measles complications, especially breathing problems.\n <\/p>\n \n Many parents didn\u2019t initially realize the potential severity of the illness, Peters said. Some suggested to him that all the children should become infected, to achieve natural \u201cherd immunity\u201d \u2013 an idea rejected as dangerous by most doctors. The parents in favor of vaccines began to fight with those opposed.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI actually scheduled appointments with doctors for the parents,\u201d the principal recalled. \u201cI do not want children to pass away just because we\u2019re being careless.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n After the epidemic took off in Cuauhtemoc, health authorities scrambled. Many had never dealt with a measles case.\n <\/p>\n \n Hern\u00e1ndez met with Mennonite leaders, who pledged their cooperation. Information about measles was translated into Low German. Teams of vaccinators scoured the Mennonites\u2019 neighborhoods, offering shots to them and their agricultural workers. Soon the campaign swelled statewide. The teams provided shots to almost half of Chihuahua state\u2019s roughly 4 million residents, said Clarke.\n <\/p>\n \n By early this year, though, the epicenter had shifted 800 miles south to Jalisco<\/a>, a state with thriving agricultural and high-tech industries. State authorities were so alarmed they ordered students and teachers in Guadalajara, the capital, to wear face masks<\/a> for several weeks, according to an official news release.\n <\/p>\n \n With a significant government vaccine campaign, the number of cases has since sharply declined, and just in time: Guadalajara is one of the host cities for the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament starting in June. In the past several weeks, Mexico has administered around 25 million shots nationwide, Clarke said.\n <\/p>\n \n In the United States too, weekly tallies of measles cases have dropped recently after outbreaks in Utah, Arizona, South Carolina and Florida, according to federal health data.\n <\/p>\n \n But Dr. William Moss, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said it was too soon to say the U.S. measles threat was over.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt will all depend upon whether an infectious individual travels or ends up in a community of susceptibles,\u201d he said. There are a growing number of such communities across the United States where people have opted out of vaccines.\n <\/p>\n \n And the toll of the outbreaks may yet increase. The measles virus can result in long-term damage, including a weakening of children\u2019s immune systems. In rare cases, it can provoke brain or nervous-system damage long after the initial infection.\n <\/p>\n \n Bergen\u2019s children appear to have bounced back from their illness.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cUp until now, we\u2019ve seen no follow-up complications,\u201d their father said.\n <\/p>\n \n For the next few years, though, he\u2019ll be watching.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cuauhtemoc, Mexico\u00a0\u2014\u00a0 It all started when a 9-year-old boy went with his parents to visit relatives in Seminole,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-296959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Farm](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ap25122140204193.jpg\")
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