Sure hope this is an isolated case.
A middle school student in Collin County has tested positive for measles, health officials confirmed Wednesday, the first reported case in a child in the Dallas-Fort Worth area this year amid an outbreak of cases in Texas.
The student attends Willow Springs Middle School in Lucas, part of the Lovejoy Independent School District, according to Collin County Health Care Services. It was not immediately clear whether the child’s measles case was connected to the ongoing outbreak that began in West Texas in January.
“We are working closely with the school and public health officials to notify potentially exposed individuals and implement appropriate precautions,” Derrick Jackson, a county spokesperson, wrote in an email to The Dallas Morning News. “Measles is a highly contagious disease, and we encourage families to ensure their vaccinations are up to date.”
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Last week, Collin County health officials warned of a possible measles exposure in Plano. Officials said an individual who spent time in the county on April 10-11 and visited three retailers in Plano had tested positive for measles. The case reported in Lucas this week is not related to the possible exposure at three stores in Plano, Jackson said.
Also last week, a measles case was confirmed in Rockwall County, possibly connected to the West Texas outbreak.
The Texas Department of State Health Services’ most recent update on the outbreak, which was released Tuesday, did not include any cases in Collin County.
We’ve seen isolated cases in counties like Harris and Fort Bend, that were not related to Gaines County and didn’t spread beyond the initial patients. I sure hope that’s what’s happening here.
I’ve shared some stories of vaccination clinics having to close because of federal grant cutbacks. Here’s another.
Austin Public Health says new federal grant cuts will limit the number of people it can vaccinate through its clinics amid Texas’ ongoing measles outbreak.
The department’s Immunization Unit lost funding late last month after the U.S. Health and Human Services Department ended COVID-19 grants. A total of 27 Austin Public Health positions were removed as a result of the federal cuts, making it harder for the department to staff its clinics and administer vaccines.
“Our money is going away that we have used … to vaccinate people through some of our teams (and) our mobile teams, and so that capacity is going to decrease,” said Austin-Travis County Health Authority Dr. Desmar Walkes in an interview with Hey Austin.
Austin Public Health has been using its clinics to administer vaccines including those for MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), to help prevent a measles outbreak in Travis County. As of Tuesday, a total of 624 measles cases and two child fatalities have been confirmed in West Texas.
In Travis County, only one case of measles has been confirmed, in an unvaccinated child who had been traveling, Walkes said. The department was preparing for measles as early as last year, and ramped up efforts after the Travis County case was confirmed in late February, holding regular meetings and increasing outreach.
That’s from the newsletter for the CityCast Austin podcast. Yes, there are two Texas cities with CityCast podcasts, and neither of them are Dallas.
You may be thinking hey, I’m vaccinated, or old enough to have gotten immunity the old-fashioned way. This isn’t my problem now. How bad could it be that some unvaxxed people get sick? Well, it could be very bad.
While it’s impossible to say for certain, experts say that we’re standing on a precipice. It’s not out of the question that measles could rip through the entire country like wildfire. If each case is a spark, “the brush is burning right now,” says epidemiologist Michael Mina, who studies how infections and vaccines affect human health. Whether the burning brush will ignite the whole forest just depends on how long our strained firewalls can hold.
Measles could continue breaking out in these bubbles (bad, but relatively confined to certain geographic areas). Or, if those bubbles grow large enough, they could converge and turn into a countrywide epidemic (very, very bad). To imagine how bad it could get, we can look to Europe, Mina recently argued in a New York Times op-ed. In 2018, the continent saw more than 80,000 cases, tens of thousands of hospitalizations, and over 70 deaths, Mina says, including in countries that had achieved—and subsequently lost—elimination status. That’s possible here, too.
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While measles’ mortality rate is relatively low compared with other diseases—about 0.2 percent of people infected with measles in the U.S. will die—the hospitalization rate is incredibly high: 20 percent, for people who haven’t been vaccinated. “This is not a benign disease,” says Weber. “How many infectious diseases do we have that 10 to 20 percent of the people end up in the hospital?” (It’s certainly not that high for flu, COVID, or other respiratory illnesses.)
All that being said, here’s the very worst-case scenario for what could happen next with measles, according to Steier’s calculations. Given measles’ mortality rate of 0.2 percent, if the entire unvaccinated U.S. population (23.5 million people) were exposed to measles, nearly 50,000 people could die. (This would likely occur over several years.) Given that 90 percent of exposed unvaccinated people become infected, and then 20 percent of that number face hospitalization, millions could end up in the hospital, and some with potentially lifelong complications, including neurological damage, intellectual disabilities, and hearing loss. They also face the risk of something called immune amnesia, where the immune system “forgets” its immunity to other infectious diseases for a period of weeks to years. Even if they survive the measles, they could suffer or die from something else because they got the measles. None of these calculations include the 22 million immunocompromised Americans who face heightened risk even if they were vaccinated.
So yeah, that’s bad. Unlikely, to be sure, but not zero. And we’re making it much harder to do the one thing that would lower the odds and reduce the severity of this scenario.
And finally, here’s your Friday update.
Texas health officials reported that a measles outbreak centered in the South Plains region grew to 646 cases on Friday, with more than two-thirds of infections in children and teens.
The latest update from the Texas Department of State Health Services added 22 new cases since the agency’s last update on Tuesday. Nearly all of the cases have been in individuals who have not received the vaccine that protects against measles, mumps and rubella, or whose vaccination status is unknown.
There have been 64 people hospitalized for treatment since the outbreak began in late January. Two children, an 8-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl, died after contracting the virus.
The DSHS estimated that fewer than 10 of the Texans who have contracted measles amid the outbreak — about 1% of the total — are actively infectious because they developed a rash less than a week ago. An individual may be infectious up to four days before a rash appears and up to four days after it’s gone.
The DSHS said there is ongoing measles transmission in 10 counties across the state: Cochran, Dallam, Dawson, Gaines, Garza, Lynn, Lamar, Lubbock, Terry and Yoakum.
The outbreak has also spread to New Mexico, which reported 66 cases of measles on Friday, and Oklahoma, which reported 13. New Mexico has reported one suspected measles death, an unvaccinated adult who tested positive for the virus after dying.
Texas has reported 49 new cases of measles over the past week, according to DSHS data. The state has been reporting about 50 new cases of measles per week since Valentine’s Day, aside from a two-week surge in late March and early April.
Seven of the 22 new cases reported on Friday are in Gaines County. The small county along the New Mexico border has now seen a total of 393 cases, nearly 61% of all infections associated with the outbreak.
Terry County reported five new cases, increasing its total to 59. Terry County has reported the second-most cases associated with the outbreak.
Three new cases were reported in Lamar County, raising its total to 14. Cochran, Dawson and El Paso counties each reported two new cases, while Andrews County reported one new case.
Of the 646 cases in Texas, 191 have been in children younger than 5 years old and 243 have been in children and teens between 5 and 17, according to the DSHS.
Only 28 cases — about 4% of all cases associated with the outbreak — have been in people who received at least one dose of MMR vaccine prior to an infection.
Texas has seen 28 measles cases in 2025 that are not connected to the outbreak, most of them associated with international travel, according to the DSHS. Four have been in Harris County, one was in Fort Bend County and one was in Brazoria County.
I appreciate that paragraph about the rate of new cases per week. It’s not that the case counts are declining, they’re steady at this level after there was a brief surge. That number could surely go up – I continue to be worried about new cases showing up in the bigger counties – but so far that has not happened. Here’s hoping.
SOME THOUGHTS ON COMPULSION AND CONSCRIPTION
I am not an anti-vaxxer (got several COVID shots), but we should keep things in perspective:
YOUR ARM, YOUR CHOICE
At the individual level, you can make sure you yourself are vaxxed and your kid is. Since you are the parent, you can subject your kid to compulsory injections (unless a family court has curbed your discretion). So your protection and that of your minors is under your control. As for other parents, there are limits to what you (and the state) can dictate and enforce.
NATURAL VS. ARTIFICIALLY INDUCED IMMUNITY
Also, while it’s great that we have the MMM vaccine now, this wasn’t so for the children of the Sixties. I happend to be one of those and we all got measles and several other childhood diseases, including mumps and whooping caugh and what not. And then all those biking, skiing, roughhousing, and other accidents and scrapes, flesh wounds, concussions and broken bones and plaster cast to straighten limbs and let them heal (with autographs and doodles of your friends on it). It was part of growing up. There was a higher tolerance for risk then, and there were fights amoung boys. Playgrounds were actually pretty dangerious too then, but we didn’t just play in such controlled environments. There were much more alluring venues. And many dangers lurking in the woods, on the water, in the mountains. In short, it wasn’t safe then, but a good portion of our cohort made it and got live a long life, happy more or less, or otherwise. A few perished for various reasons, including foolhardiness, and a few killed themselves deliberately. There was attrition, you might say. Life wasn’t perfect then, nor was continuity of life guaranteed. Nor can it ever be.
WHEN MEASLES WAS ONE OF THOSE THINGS
As for keeping an open mind regarding measles specifically, a recent empirical study based on antibody readings of a large Central European sample appears to indicate that the immunity acquired naturally (before the advent of the measles vaccine and mass administration thereof) is actually better, at least for the surviving members of the pre-vax cohort. That’s why we (the children of the 60s and 70s) don’t need the measles vaccine or any boosters. At least that’s my conclusion from limited inquiry
If you want to see for yourself, you can start here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40276882/
David N. Springer et al, Seroprevalence against measles, Austria, stratified by birth years 1922 to 2024
For Italy, which is famous for is people longevity, see: Tiziana Grassi et al, Seroprevalence of measles antibodies in the Italian general population in 2019–2020, finding that “Subjects 20–39 and 40–64 years old had significantly higher antibody titers suggesting a protection against measles mainly derived from natural infection. Seroprevalence was significantly higher in the South (93.2 %) than in the Northern-Central Italy (88.9 %)”).
COMMUNIAL VS. INDIVIDUALISTIC PROBLEM PERCEPTION
Let me also comment on the Mennonites and their vaccination recalcitrance:
Unlike the vast majority of Americans, they live communially and have lots of kids, so they can afford to lose one of a bevy. It may still be sad, but if you are religious you may be willing to accept it as an “Act of God” or as the way things are and take their course. You can still feel blessed with your family’s (and whole community’s) fecundity because there are still all those surviving siblings. And a young couple can still replace a lost child by having another one.
Again, a more multi-generational/historical perspective would serve us well.
PRE-MILLENIAL CHILDREN AND YOUNG-PEOPLE MORTALITY
In the not too distant past, infant mortality was high and the young-man morbidity and fatality rate was exceptionaly high during the two world wars (with some exception, such as the Mennonites that would leave and resettle elsewhere where the government in power couldn’t conscript their young man and force them to to go off to war to kill others). That’s how the Canadian Mennonites ended up in Chihuahua. And they previously migrated to Canada for the same reason: opposition to organized mass killing in war. War kills. Pacifism saves lives (as long as you can get away in time).
On the high birthrate, see James P. Hurd et al, The shape of high fertility in a traditional Mennonite population (2006), reporting that “from 1966 to 1996, total fertility ranged from 10.68 to 8.31 for married women, and age-specific fertility rates for 20-24-year-old women never dropped below 0.500. For similar time periods, no higher rates were found in any of the comparison groups.”
More recent studies indicate it’s gone down, but it’s still high compared to population at large. But there aren’t enough Mennonists to save us – the post-industrial world – from demgrpahic collapse.
“ But there aren’t enough Mennonists to save us – the post-industrial world – from demgrpahic collapse.”
Climate change degrading the carrying capacity of the planet is a far bigger threat to the survival of the human species.