A Texas health authority is warning against “measles parties” as the outbreak in West Texas grew to at least 146 cases, with 20 hospitalized and one unvaccinated school-age child dead. The outbreak continues to be mainly in unvaccinated children.
In a press briefing hosted by the city of Lubbock, Texas, on Friday, Ron Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, offered a stark warning for Texans in his opening statements.
“What I want you to hear is: It’s not good to go have measles parties because what may happen is—we can’t predict who’s going to do poorly with measles, be hospitalized, potentially get pneumonia or encephalitis and or pass away from this,” Cook said. “So that’s a foolish idea to go have a measles party. The best thing to do is make sure that you’re well vaccinated.”
Lubbock sits about 90 miles northwest of the outbreak’s epicenter in Gaines County, which is one of the state’s least vaccinated counties. It has recorded 98 of the outbreak’s 146 cases. While Lubbock has only reported two of the 146 cases, patients from elsewhere have been treated in Lubbock. That includes the first two cases in the outbreak as well as the child who died of the infection earlier this week, who was not a resident of Lubbock.
It’s unclear if any measles parties are occurring in Gaines or elsewhere. “It’s mostly been … social media talk,” Cook said in response to a follow-up question from Ars. He noted that measles parties and chickenpox parties were more common practices decades ago, before vaccines for both diseases were available. But he again warned about the dangers today. “Please don’t do that. It’s just foolishness; it’s playing roulette,” he said.
Cook, along with Lubbock’s director of public health, Katherine Wells, said they see no end in sight for the outbreak, which now spans nine counties in Texas, many of which have low vaccination rates. “This outbreak is going to continue to grow,” Wells said, declining to forecast how high the final case count could go after a reporter raised the possibility of several hundred.
So far, 116 of the 146 cases are under the age of 18, with 46 being 4 or under. Only five of the 146 were vaccinated with at least one dose of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Messaging
On a more positive note, Wells reported that the outbreak has seemed to sway some vaccine-hesitant parents to get their children vaccinated. Just yesterday in Lubbock, over 50 children came into the city’s clinic for measles vaccines. Eleven of those children had vaccine exemptions, meaning their parents had previously gone through the state process to exempt their child from having to receive routine childhood vaccines to attend school. “Which is a really good sign; that means our message is getting out there,” Wells said.
So far in the outbreak, which erupted in late January, messaging about the disease and the importance of vaccination has exclusively come from state and local authorities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only released a brief statement late Thursday, which was not sent through the agency’s press distribution list. It did, however, note that “vaccination remains the best defense against measles infection.”
During a cabinet meeting Wednesday, US health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. responded to a question about the outbreak, offering a variety of inaccurate information. Kennedy downplayed the outbreak, falsely claiming that “it’s not unusual.” Actually, this is an unusual year for measles in the US. As epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina noted on Bluesky, the number of US measles cases this year has already surpassed the total case counts from eight of the previous 15 years. And it is only February.