At least 49 cases have been confirmed. Health officials — who are scrambling to get a handle on the vaccine-preventable outbreak — suspect 200 to 300 people may be infected.

Summary

A measles outbreak in rural West Texas has surged to 49 confirmed cases, mostly among unvaccinated school-age children, with officials suspecting hundreds more unreported infections.

The outbreak is centered in Gaines County, home to a large Mennonite population with low vaccination rates. Despite CDC support, Texas has not requested federal intervention.

The outbreak has now spread to Lubbock, raising wider public health concerns.

Experts warn it could persist for months without increased vaccination efforts, but skepticism toward vaccines remains a significant barrier.

  • HowAbt2morrowEnglish
    982·
    5 days ago

    How bad are the measles, really? Asking because I was born in the 1st fucking world and never met anyone under a 100 that met someone with it.

    • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
      991·
      5 days ago

      We think of measles as a minor viral infection of kids that causes fever, rash, and a runny nose, and goes away without major complications. Unfortunately, that is not always so. Nervous system disease is a particular problem. SSPE occurs as a late, fatal measles complication in one out of 1,367 cases of measles in children younger than 5. One out of 1,000 children with measles gets an infection of the brain (encephalitis) early in the course of measles. About 15% of children with measles encephalitis die. Measles encephalitis led to the death of the writer Roald Dahl’s daughter Olivia.

      Children’s brains can also develop an allergic reaction to the measles virus several weeks after infection. This is called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM). Children seem to recover, then get fever, confusion, headaches, and neck stiffness. Like SSPE and measles encephalitis, ADEM occurs in about one out of 1,000 cases of measles. It is fatal in 10% to 20% of patients. Survivors of measles encephalitis and ADEM often have epilepsy, brain damage, or developmental delay.

      Measles has other serious complications. During pregnancy, it causes miscarriages. Measles can infect the cornea, and was once a common cause of blindness. Ear infections and hearing loss are frequent. Measles virus also infects the lungs, causing pneumonia in 3% to 4% of cases. Measles weakens the immune system for at least two months. Sometimes patients die of other infections immediately after they recover from measles. In a measles epidemic that killed more than 3,000 soldiers in the US Army in 1917–18, bacterial pneumonia was the major cause of death.

      Measles: The forgotten killer - John Ross, MD, FIDSA, Contributor; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing

      • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
        64·
        5 days ago

        Essentially, when you’re infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it’s ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what’s good and what’s bad almost from scratch. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia

        • Kitathalla@lemy.lolEnglish
          18·
          4 days ago

          current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what’s good and what’s bad almost from scratch

          While that’s horrifying, I wonder if it could offer a glimpse into ways to get rid of allergies.

      • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        71·
        4 days ago

        Yeah, but this doesn’t happen if you eat right, work out, get your chakras aligned and get enough vitamin D from sunshine, right?

        • sapient [they/them]@infosec.pub
          27·
          5 days ago

          Extremely, iirc. According to wikipedia:

          It is extremely contagious: nine out of ten people who are not immune and share living space with an infected person will be infected.[5] Furthermore, measles’s reproductive number estimates vary beyond the frequently cited range of 12 to 18,[17] with a 2017 review giving a range of 3.7 to 203.3

          For context the reproductive number (average number of unexposed people a carrier will infect) of the most virulent strains of COVID-19 is 3-8. See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35262737/ (basic vs effective rate refers to the infectiveness in a naive population vs one which is taking measures and/or has immunity).

          This is also all exponential so small increases in R number have big impacts nya.

          • Serinus@lemmy.world
            18·
            4 days ago

            Pretty sure measles is the one where you can catch it by just walking into a room where someone where an infected person was two hours ago.

            Imagine it’s third period trig and you caught measles from the kid who was in first period trig without ever having seen him.

            It’s bad. Afaik measles is the most contagious disease we’ve ever seen.

        • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
          101·
          5 days ago

          I appreciate the thought, but I just copied and pasted Dr. Ross’s article. Bestof should probably be kept for things produced by community members.

    • tunetardis@lemmy.caEnglish
      461·
      5 days ago

      I have no first-hand experience with it either, but understand that in addition to its direct shitty flu-like symptoms and the telltale rash, it has this strange ability to factory reset your immune system so you get to go through all those other diseases your body fought off in the past again.

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
        14·
        5 days ago

        Vaccinations too.

        Y’know…maybe that’s why the anti-vaxxers want measles. And want it to make a comeback.

    • reddig33@lemmy.world
      25·
      5 days ago

      “In the US, 20 percent of people with measles are typically hospitalized. Five percent develop pneumonia, and up to 3 in 1,000 die of the infection. In rare cases, measles can cause a fatal disease of the central nervous system called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which develops years after infection. Measles also wipes out immune responses to other infections (a phenomenon known as immune amnesia), making people vulnerable to other infectious diseases.”

      https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/02/texas-measles-outbreak-climbs-to-48-cases-almost-all-kids-13-hospitalized/

      • OutlierBlue@lemmy.caEnglish
        9·
        4 days ago

        In the US, 20 percent of people with measles are typically hospitalized.

        1 in 5 people with measles are hospitalized. Good thing they’ve got socialized healthcare to cover that!

        Oh… wait.

    • jeffw@lemmy.worldM
      102·
      5 days ago

      Compared to a lot of terrible shit, less bad? But still bad. You’d have to be young or old to die from it with modern medicine.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
        5·
        5 days ago

        Isn’t the measles the one where you can live with modern medicine, but you’re still likely to be disfigured possibly even paralyzed in some manner? Or is that the mumps I’m thinking of?

        • Mirshe@lemmy.world
          2·
          3 days ago

          If you JUST get measles, you should be fine. The issue is the potential for immune amnesia - meaning the potential for opportunistic infection is incredibly high, as is the potential for that infection to become serious.