Measles Damage

Measles is now attacking the gut, liver, lungs and brain of previously healthy children in Pennsylvania, doctors there say, and nearly all of the sick kids are unvaccinated.

At Penn State Health Golisano Children's Hospital in Dauphin County, about 10 children have been hospitalized with measles complications this year, said Dr. Patrick Gavigan, a pediatric infectious disease physician there. Fever, rash and respiratory distress are the most common symptoms, he told ABC News. Some developed gastrointestinal illness, including hepatitis.

Pennsylvania is in the middle of one of its worst measles outbreaks in decades. When ABC News reported, the state had logged 731 cases and 141 hospitalizations, 296 of them in Lancaster County. By the time The 19th checked with the state health department, the count had climbed to 977 cases, nearly 40% of them in Lancaster County. At least 53 pregnant women have been infected, the department told The 19th. It also told The 19th that more than 100 cases reported since Oct. 2 were in children under four.

Five deaths have now been confirmed, the department told The 19th. The first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. Among the dead are two infants in Lancaster County, a 40-year-old woman, an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old with leukemia. One infant had congenital measles, passed in utero from an unvaccinated mother, The 19th reported. It wasn't clear whether the second infant, who had a genetic birth disorder, was exposed before or after birth.

Dr. John Goldman, an infectious disease specialist for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said he'd seen measles only twice in three decades of practice before this year. Now, patients arrive almost daily, he told ABC News. Gavigan said most hospitalized children come from unvaccinated families in communities that forgo the shot.

Goldman believes the true case count runs higher than reported. "The worst part is we're almost certainly underestimating the cases," he told ABC News, explaining that whole households often fall ill before anyone gets tested.

Dr. Sharee Livingston, an OBGYN in Lancaster County, told The 19th she never saw a single measles case during her medical training in the mid-2000s. In the past six months, she estimates she has treated at least a dozen infected patients. "Air doesn't know that there's a border between Pennsylvania and Ohio," she said.

Vaccinations have risen alongside the outbreak. The health department administered 6,725 MMR doses in 2026, most of them in August, when monthly totals jumped from under 1,000 to about 3,500 shots, department data cited by ABC News show. Two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles, according to the CDC.

There's no national standard for tracking congenital measles cases, the Pennsylvania health department told The 19th, so it's working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to build one.

"Measles wasn't a conversation we were having before," Dr. Kisha Davis, president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians, told The 19th. "But it is now."