The West Texas measles outbreak, the nation’s largest in 30 years, is now over, state health officials announced on Monday.
The Texas Department of State Health Services announced the outbreak was over after no new cases had been reported in 42 days.
“We arrived at this point through a comprehensive outbreak response that included testing, vaccination, disease monitoring and educating the public about measles through awareness campaigns,” DSHS Commissioner Dr. Jennifer A. Shuford said in a statement. “I also want to recognize the many health care professionals who identified and treated cases of a virus that most providers had never seen in person before this outbreak.”
The outbreak began in late January in Seminole and eventually spread to more than 10 Texas counties and to three other states — Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma — as well as Mexico.
As of Aug. 18, 762 Texas cases of measles were detected and more than two-thirds of the cases involved children. Ninety-six people were hospitalized and two Seminole children died from the disease. Most of those infected were unvaccinated.
See here for the last case count update I had, and here for the most recent post on the subject. The full press release is here, and while this is unqualified good news for Texas, it comes with two provisos. One is that this is just the end of the outbreak that began in Gaines County. Elsewhere in the country and the larger region, there’s still an outbreak.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) reported on Friday an increase in measles cases in the Americas, particularly North America, amid rising deaths from the infection in Mexico, the United States and Canada.
The outbreaks are related to low vaccination coverage, the U.N. agency said, as 71% of cases occurred in unvaccinated people and 18% in individuals with unknown vaccination status.
As of August 8, 10,139 cases of measles and 18 related deaths had been confirmed from among 10 countries in the Americas, representing a 34-fold increase compared to the same period in 2024, PAHO figures showed.
Of those 18 deaths, 14 were in Mexico, three in the United States and one in Canada.
Most of the deaths in Mexico occurred in Indigenous people between 1 and 54 years old, PAHO said.
That third US death was also related to the Texas outbreak; it was an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico. I didn’t find any other stories in my Google news search, so this is all I know. This was much bigger than what we went through here, and the same trends in un-vaccination are at play.
And speaking of that, here’s the second proviso:
Texas school districts are coming back from summer with a rising number of parents asking for vaccine exemption forms and a new law that will make those documents even easier to obtain.
Combined with funding cuts to public vaccination programs, chilling effects of immigration policies on health care, and the wearying battle by school nurses to balance parental consent and overall student body health, Texas schools are on track to have the lowest vaccination rates in decades if exemption rates continue to climb.
“I do think that there is a problem — period — that is worse than we have known about previously,” said Terri Burke, executive director of The Immunization Partnership, which advocates for public policies that support increased access to vaccines.
Since 2018, the requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for a vaccine exemption form have doubled from 45,900 to more than 93,000 in 2024.
In July, ahead of the new school year, the state received 17,197 requests for a vaccine exemption form, 36% higher than the number reported in July 2023. Because each requestor can have forms for up to eight individuals, the number of children those forms covered also soared — 23,231 in July 2023 compared to 30,596 in July 2025.
Now, as some public health departments indicate there are drops in the number of poorer children coming to them to get vaccinated during the summer months, and a new Sept. 1 law that will make the vaccination exemption form downloadable instead of it being mailed, vaccine experts fear herd immunity will be tougher to achieve.
There will be more of these outbreaks in the future. Maybe not next year, and maybe not as bad as this one. Or maybe worse, who knows. But there will be more. Everything we’re doing is making conditions more hospitable for the viruses.