Measles

Newsweek - The United States could finish 2026 with as many as 6,500 confirmed measles cases, infectious disease experts told Newsweek, as vaccine skepticism fuels outbreaks in under-vaccinated communities and threatens the country's measles-elimination status.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, predicted that the country would end the year with “roughly 6,000 to 6,500 confirmed cases."

“This is a return of the primitive,” Adalja told Newsweek, “a disease we eliminated a quarter-century ago, back by choice.”

The United States had recorded 4,080 confirmed cases this year as of October 8, already 78 percent more than the 2025 total of 2,289 cases. The highly contagious virus was declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000 after the measles vaccine was developed decades earlier.

Measles-associated death counts this year differ between federal and state figures. The CDC has reported two deaths nationally, while Pennsylvania has confirmed five measles-associated deaths, including two infants, an 18-year-old and a 40-year-old woman. A sixth death reported by a county coroner remains under state review.

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, agrees that the U.S. is on pace to reach 6,000 to 6,500 cases in 2026.

“That’s a reasonable order of magnitude of what we can expect,” Schaffner told Newsweek.