US loses measles-free status after continued spread of the disease
Photo: REUTERS
Pan American Health Organization has revoked the United States’ measles-elimination status, ending a 26-year run after determining the country failed to halt continuous transmission of the highly contagious virus for more than a year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The international health body did not immediately respond to a request from Reuters for comment on the report, which cited people familiar with the matter.
The reported decision by the Americas branch of the World Health Organization comes as the US battles the highest number of measles cases it has seen in more than three decades.
Some 7,500 people in the US have been infected with measles and 13 have died since 2025. That period coincides with falling immunization rates and rising vaccine hesitancy under US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has for years spread doubts, without scientific evidence, about the safety of measles vaccines.
As part of its evaluation, PAHO reviewed epidemiological and laboratory evidence submitted by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine whether the same strain of measles had been circulating in the United States uninterrupted for 12 months or longer, a sign of local transmission rather than imported cases.
Canada, Spain and the UK recently lost measles-elimination status after review by WHO experts. The US dropped out of WHO but remains a member of PAHO, its Americas branch.
Erica Schwartz, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters in an interview before the decision that if the US lost measles elimination, the agency would be doing “the same exact thing,” which entails working with states to encourage immunization.
As of Thursday, 5,182 confirmed cases of measles had been reported in 2026 to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 45 states, New York City and the District of Columbia, surpassing last year’s total of 2,289, making it one of the country’s worst measles resurgences in decades.
“It is a fully preventable disease. It is unconscionable that we have this amount of measles,” said Noel Brewer, a public health professor at the University of North Carolina.
Brewer, who chairs an independent advisory panel on measles, presented the CDC’s measles status report along with his group’s assessment of that information to PAHO on Tuesday.
That report remains confidential, but a source familiar with the CDC’s findings said the agency determined the US had 12 months of continuous transmission of the virus.
The US achieved its measles-elimination status in 2000. A country can halt transmission when 95 percent of its population is vaccinated, creating so-called herd immunity that also protects those unable to receive the vaccine.
Two doses of the measles vaccine - by far the best way to prevent infection and transmission - provide 97 percent protection against the virus, which can cause blindness, deafness, brain damage or death.
William Moss, an epidemiology professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said loss of measles elimination was a hit to the US’ reputation as a public health powerhouse. He said it may discourage other countries.
For the average American, he added, it means that the US will continue to have large outbreaks, putting people at risk of disease, hospitalization and death.
To restore measles-elimination status, a country must end transmission and remain free of an outbreak for at least 12 months.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.
Source: Reuters
