Measles Outbreak

Pennsylvania's measles outbreak is now the largest in the United States in three decades, the state health department confirmed Monday.

Cases have passed 1,004. Hospitalizations stand at 198, NBC News reported. South Carolina held the previous record from earlier this year, its outbreak topping out at 997 cases before officials contained it within six months. Pennsylvania's outbreak began in late April and hasn't slowed since, NBC News reported.

Children make up nearly a third of the cases, and 18% of those pediatric patients have ended up hospitalized, per NBC News. Dr. Evan Shirey of Penn State Health Golisano Children's Hospital told NBC News that doctors have treated dehydration, liver inflammation and brain swelling so severe that some children no longer recognized their parents. Five deaths in all. A teenager died of severe brain inflammation. Two babies didn't survive, including a newborn whose mother had gone into labor a month early. A 40-year-old woman with a history of asthma also died. The fifth victim, an unvaccinated Lancaster County resident, died too, NBC News reported.

Lancaster County has absorbed the bulk of Pennsylvania's cases. About 44,000 Amish residents live there. Only 88.5% of the county's kindergartners had gotten the measles vaccine in 2024, well below the 95% rate public health officials say is needed to stop an outbreak, an NBC News analysis found. Dr. John Goldman, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told NBC News the same spread could hit any county with a large unvaccinated population.

Truthout reported that Lancaster County alone logged more than 200 cases in the first eight months of 2026. A CDC report issued last week put the national measles count above 3,000 for the year, the first time it has passed that level since 1991. Before joining the Trump administration, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed an anti-vaccination gathering in Lancaster County in 2021 and recommended chicken soup and vitamin A for measles, Truthout reported. Dr. Holmes Morton, a Lancaster County pediatric specialist, told Truthout he recently treated a family of 10 on a Mifflin County farm. All ten were sick with measles. They planned to go to church, the market and school without isolating.

Pennsylvania has handed out 8,843 measles vaccine doses since the outbreak began, NBC News reported. That's far short of the roughly 15,000 doses South Carolina administered, an 82% increase officials there credited with ending their outbreak in April. Ohio is now fighting its own growing outbreak along the Pennsylvania border, according to NBC News. Goldman expects Pennsylvania's outbreak to drag on for three to six more months.