(9 Jul 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
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ASSOCIATED PRESS
Madison, Wisconsin – 9 July 2025
1. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jonathan Temte, University of Wisconsin:
"Measles is a highly contagious respiratory virus that has plagued humans for an eternity. But with the advent in 1964 of very effective vaccines, we saw a decline across the world, in particular in the United States, to the point that by the year 2000, We declared measles eliminated. Which means cases will not keep propagating through the population."
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2. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jonathan Temte, University of Wisconsin:
"It continues to be eliminated, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have big outbreaks and cases that keep going. For example, in 2019 we had a large outbreak in New York that was over 1,200 cases, and we came very close with that outbreak to losing elimination."
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3. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jonathan Temte, University of Wisconsin:
"The rule is that you have to have a continuous chain of transmission that extends past a year or 52 weeks. And so right now, we’re about halfway there, from January 20th or thereabouts until present day. The question is, do we contain this, or is it kind of already out of the bottle here?"
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4. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jonathan Temte, University of Wisconsin:
"My fear right now is over the last five years we’ve seen the public health system in this country really degraded, you know, throughout Covid and more recently through some decisions being made federally to reduce funding and capacity."
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5. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jonathan Temte, University of Wisconsin:
"It really is made more difficult when you don’t have an intact public health system, when you don’t have a population that believes in evidence-based science and is racked with concerns about conspiracy. And you have people who basically profiteer off misinformation."
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6. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr. Jonathan Temte, University of Wisconsin:
"All of us are kind of there pulling for our patients, for our communities, for our populations. And when we have tools that can really be helpful and see that they’re discarded for no good reason, it’s met with a little bit of melancholy on our part."
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STORYLINE:
The U.S. is having its worst year for measles spread in more than three decades, with a total of 1,288 cases nationally and another six months to go in 2025.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that the national case count surpassed 2019, when there were 1,274 cases for the year and the country almost lost its status of having eliminated the vaccine-preventable illness. That could happen this year if the virus has nonstop spread for 12 months.
This year’s outbreaks, some of them interconnected, started five months ago in undervaccinated communities in West Texas. Three people have died — two children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico — and dozens of people have been hospitalized. Public health experts maintain the true case count may be higher than state health departments have confirmed.
North America has three other major measles outbreaks, with 2,966 cases in Chihuahua state, Mexico, 2,223 cases in Ontario, Canada and 1,230 in Alberta, Canada. Thirteen other states have current confirmed outbreaks of three or more people — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah — and four other states saw their outbreaks end.
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