Steep federal funding cuts have forced public health officials in one of Texas’ most populous counties, Dallas, to cancel dozens of free measles vaccination clinics and lay off 21 workers combating the outbreak, NBC News reported April 1.
“I just had to tell our commissioners this morning that we’ve had to cancel over 50 different clinics in our community,” Philip Huang, MD., director of Dallas County Health and Human Services told the news outlet.
Here are four more updates:
- Many of the canceled measles clinics were scheduled for schools in the area with reported low vaccination rates, according to Dr. Huang. The free vaccines included measles, mumps and rubella shots. The $11.4 billion funding nationwide cut, was originally allocated to aid community health departments during the pandemic. However, public health officials have more recently been using the funds to aid other public health initiatives, such as measles prevention.
- On April 3, a federal judge in Rhode Island temporarily blocked HHS from cancelling more than $11 billion in grants to the state health departments. This comes after 23 states and the District of Columbia filed a joint lawsuit against the Trump administration for abruptly canceling public health funding.
- As of April 3, the CDC confirmed 607 measles cases in the U.S. Of those, 93% were outbreak-related and 97% involved individuals who were unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. The 22 CDC jurisdictions affected by the outbreak are Alaska, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York City, New York State, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Washington.
- The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment confirmed the state’s first measles case since 2023 on March 31. The case involved an unvaccinated adult from Pueblo who recently traveled to a region in Mexico experiencing an active measles outbreak.
