The child was hospitalized for a week before dying.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Katherine Wells, director of public health for Lubbock, Texas, told the Post. “My heart just goes out to the family. And I hope this will help people reconsider getting children vaccinated.”
Four updates:
1. As of Feb. 26, 124 cases of measles have been confirmed in the outbreak, according to the Texas Department of State Health Service. Most of the cases involve individuals who are unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown. The majority of cases are in children ages 5 to 17, but 39 cases are among children ages 4 and under, ABC reported.
2. Lubbock, Texas-based Covenant Children’s Hospital officials said they have treated about 20 patients, all unvaccinated children.
3. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said the federal health department is following the outbreak daily.
“Mainly, we’re told [those who contract the disease are] in the Mennonite community,” he told the Post. “There are two people who have died, but … we’re watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine. There have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year, there were 16. So it’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year.”
Public health officials expressed frustration at Mr. Kennedy’s remarks, saying it downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak. Two spokespeople for the state health department and HHS also said the agencies are only aware of one death, and patients in hospitals are receiving clinical care, not being quarantined.
4. The Global Measles and Rubella Laboratory Network is a World Health Organization-led program with 760 labs worldwide that tests about 500,000 patient samples annually. It relies entirely on U.S. funding to operate at around $8 million annually. However, the network is on the brink of collapse after President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw from the United Nations agency, Bloomberg reported.
“Protecting this resource is absolutely imperative,” Matthew Ferrari, PhD, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, told Bloomberg. “It provides the information needed to advance those programs, and any threat to it will reverberate far beyond measles.”
