A second child with measles has reportedly died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone.
The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the eight-year-old girl had died from “measles pulmonary failure” early Thursday at a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, citing records obtained by the outlet.
It marked the second time a child with measles – which is easily preventable through vaccination – had died since 26 February. The first was a six-year-old girl – also hospitalized in Lubbock – whose parents had not had her vaccinated.
NBC and Axios reported that the Trump administration health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was expected to attend the funeral of the second child, with the service scheduled for Sunday.
Kennedy for years has baselessly sowed doubt about vaccine safety and efficacy. In March, he sparked alarm among those concerned by the US’s measles outbreak when he backed vitamins to treat the illness and stopped short of endorsing protective vaccines, which he minimized as merely a “personal choice” rather than a safety measure that long ago was proven effective.
A third person to have died after contracting measles was an unvaccinated person in Lea county, New Mexico, officials in that state announced in early March, though the virus has not been confirmed as the cause of death.
Measles, which is caused by a highly contagious, airborne virus that spreads easily when an infected person breathes, sneezes or coughs, had been declared eliminated from the US in 2000. But the virus has recently been spreading in undervaccinated communities, with Texas and New Mexico standing among five states with active outbreaks – which is defined as three or more cases.
The other states are Kansas, Ohio and Oklahoma. Collectively, as of Friday, the US had surpassed 600 measles cases so far this year – more than double the number it recorded in all of 2024.
Texas alone was reporting 481 cases across 19 counties, most of them in the western region of the state. It registered 59 previously unreported cases between Tuesday and Friday. There were also 14 new hospitalizations, for a total of 56 throughout the outbreak.
More than 65% of Texas’s measles cases are in Gaines county, which has a population of just under 23,000, and was where the virus started spreading in a tightly knit, undervaccinated Mennonite community.
Gaines has logged 315 cases – in just over 1% of the county’s residents – since late January.
