A school-age child has died of measles in West Texas, the first death from the disease in a decade in the United States. The child had not been vaccinated against measles, according to the city of Lubbock’s health department.
The death, confirmed by Katherine Wells, the Lubbock health department’s director of public health, is part of a fast-moving outbreak that’s infected at least 124 people — mostly children — in rural West Texas.
The official tally of people who have been hospitalized is 18, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
That number isn’t up to date, said Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock.
Johnson said in an email that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far.
All of those kids, she said, were admitted because they were having trouble breathing. None had been vaccinated against measles.
The outbreak has been limited so far to parts of Texas bordering New Mexico. That state has also reported nine measles cases, but officials have not said whether they are connected.
It’s unclear how the outbreak originated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Texas Department of State Health Services told NBC News that genotype testing had linked the outbreak to a strain of the measles virus called D8 currently circulating in Europe and the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean region, which includes countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Southwest Asia. None of the samples have been linked to the vaccine.
This is the first measles death to be reported in the U.S. since 2015, when a Washington woman died. Health officials at the time said she’d likely been exposed at a clinic in a rural part of the state that was experiencing an outbreak.
Measles was considered eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 because of widespread use of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Two doses of the shot are 97% effective in preventing the disease.
