Measles has been confirmed in a Los Angeles County resident who recently returned from Texas, a state that is in the midst of an outbreak of the highly infectious disease, health officials said Friday.
The outbreak in Texas is one of the worst seen in the U.S. in years, and it has claimed the lives of two school-aged children who were unvaccinated and had no underlying medical conditions, according to a report published Thursday in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
This is the third measles case reported by the L.A. County Department of Public Health so far this year. In March, a county resident who had recently traveled through Los Angeles International Airport on a China Airlines flight from Taipei, Taiwan, tested positive. And in February, a case was reported in a non-L.A. County resident who arrived on a Korean Air flight from Seoul.
“The traveler was not infectious during the time of travel,” the county Department of Public Health said in a statement Friday regarding the most recent case.
Officials are working to identify people who may have been exposed while the infected person was contagious with the virus.
Symptoms of measles include a high fever — above 101 degrees — cough, runny nose, red and watery eyes and a rash, which usually starts on the face and spreads to the rest of the body.
Measles spreads easily through the air and can remain airborne and on surfaces for hours, even after an infectious person has left the room.
People can spread measles to others from four days before the disease’s telltale rash appears through four days afterward, according to the CDC. People who have not been immunized against measles, either through vaccination or prior infection, are at risk of getting sick between seven and 21 days after exposure.
Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective against infection, health officials say.
CDC officials have identified 10 measles outbreaks nationwide. The largest began in a close-knit community with low vaccination rates in Texas’ Gaines County, adjacent to New Mexico.
That outbreak has since spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma, and is suspected to be linked to more cases in Kansas, the CDC report said. A growing outbreak in the Mexican state of Chihuahua was also reported after a resident fell ill after visiting Gaines County.
So far this year, 884 measles cases have been reported nationwide, “the second-highest annual case count in 25 years,” according to the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
During all of 2024, 285 measles cases were reported nationally.
Of the cases reported so far this year, the median patient age was 8. About one-third of those infected were younger than 5, the report said. Among all measles patients, 96% were not vaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status.
Nationally, 85 measles patients this year have had to be hospitalized. Except for one, all of them were either unvaccinated or had an unknown vaccination status. Texas officials have said the cause of the state’s latest measles death was measles pulmonary failure.
Most of the measles cases reported so far nationally this year are tied to close-knit communities with low vaccination coverage, the CDC said.
Before Friday’s announcement, nine measles cases had been reported in California this year, with cases also reported in Orange, Riverside, Fresno, San Mateo, Placer and Tuolumne counties, according to the California Department of Public Health.
In 2024, California confirmed 15 cases of measles. In 2023, the total was only four.
California’s worst measles outbreak in recent memory occurred between December 2014 and April 2015. Centered at Disneyland, the outbreak resulted in about 131 Californians getting infected. People from six other states, Mexico and Canada were also sickened, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Following that outbreak, California lawmakers strengthened childhood vaccination requirements for schoolchildren. For the 2023-24 academic year, 96.2% of California’s kindergartners were vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella.
That’s slightly down from the 96.5% seen the year prior. But it remains above the levels recorded before the Disneyland measles outbreak, which were less than 94%.
Public health experts say they aim for a 95% measles vaccination rate to guard against outbreaks.
Amid the ongoing outbreaks, pediatricians have stepped up efforts to rebut misinformation about both the disease and the vaccine.
“The measles vaccine is safe and effective,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a recent statement, rebutting what they called “wellness influencers and anti-vaccine advocates” who they say “falsely assert” that getting vaccinated “is as dangerous as contracting measles itself.”
“Extensive research demonstrates that the MMR vaccine is safe and significantly reduces the risk of contracting measles, a disease that can lead to severe complications and death,” the pediatrics group said.
