S. Carolina's measles milestone is everyone's problem
By Lisa Jarvis / Bloomberg Opinion
A fast-moving measles outbreak in South Carolina reached a grim milestone last week: It is now the biggest outbreak in the U.S. in a quarter century.
It’s the latest public health record to be broken as vaccine hesitancy and increasingly permissive state laws — both now intensified by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — create more and larger pockets of disease vulnerability in the U.S.
Last year, a measles outbreak in Texas led to 762 infections and the first deaths from the disease in the U.S. in a decade. Nationwide, cases hit a 34-year high. (As of Jan. 30, six cases had been reported to the Snohomish County Health Department.) The U.S.’s measles-free status, established in 2000, is likely to fall next; a fate that will be determined in April when a team from the Pan American Health Organization, the regional office for the World Health Organization, meets.
We’re entering a stage where measles is becoming the status quo, rather than the rare exception; where the stray case can easily turn into a monthslong outbreak, rather than a quickly contained incident. Consider that just a month into the year, the U.S. has already logged 588 infections; about a quarter of the number recorded in all of 2025.
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