Pa. measles outbreak grows past 800 cases; House Democrats press CDC on omitted deaths

Pennsylvania’s largest measles outbreak in three decades, currently the largest in the country, passed another sobering milestone on Wednesday: State health officials reported that more than 800 people have contracted the highly contagious disease so far this year.

The latest case counts show an increase of 111 measles cases in the last week, bringing the total to 835 people with known infections. Physicians and local health officials say this is likely an undercount, with many cases going unreported.

Chester County logged 12 new cases in the last week, bringing its total cases to 78. The outbreak in the suburban Philadelphia county is now the state’s third largest, having more than tripled in size since early August.

Chester is the only county in the Philadelphia region with cases in the current outbreak, which began in April. Montgomery County reported three cases in a separate outbreak earlier this winter.

All but a few have been in unvaccinated people.

Statewide, children under 18 make up nearly a third of the confirmed cases, and about one in five reported cases have required hospitalization.

The state reported four rare “breakthrough” cases of measles in vaccinated people earlier this month.

More than half of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties have now reported at least one measles case.

Lancaster County, with 342 cases, has the highest case counts in the state, followed by Mifflin County, which has reported 94 cases.

State officials have reported four measles-associated deaths, all affecting people who were unvaccinated and confirmed to have measles infections.

The deceased include two infants from Amish families in Lancaster County, an 18-year-old in Mifflin County who died from a serious neurological complication of measles, and a 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County with severe respiratory conditions.

But state and federal officials have clashed over how to characterize the deaths, with the Lancaster County coroner saying he did not believe measles caused one of the deaths.

The state considers all four “measles-associated deaths,” meaning deaths that occur within 30 days of symptom onset in a person with clinical evidence of infection and a positive laboratory test for measles, and who did not die of another unrelated cause, like a car crash.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for weeks omitted these deaths from its public tracking of the toll of measles outbreaks nationally, under the leadership of President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist. Kennedy at one point suggested that Shapiro’s administration had “fabricated” the deaths in Lancaster County.

The CDC updated its dashboard on Wednesday to note one measles-related death in the country, without further explanation.

On its website, the agency says it is still reviewing death data and developing a new standard definition of a measles-associated death.

The state has maintained all four deaths fit its definition for a measles-associated death.

New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone said Wednesday he is still waiting for a response to a letter he sent last week as the top Democrat on the U.S. House committee that oversees healthcare, looking for answers about the CDC’s characterization of the death.

In the letter, Pallone asked for CDC director Erica Schwartz to brief committee Democrats on her “extraordinary decision” to omit the measles-associated deaths from the agency’s measles data dashboard.

The letter noted news reports that showed the dashboard had briefly included two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania before they were removed from the website.

Health and Human Services representatives did not immediately return a request for comment on the letter.

“I think this is the ultimate hypocrisy on the part of the secretary,” Pallone said. “He promised radical transparency, every day during his confirmation hearings. I think now what we’re getting is the opposite, which is a cover-up.”

Pallone said he was concerned that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine rhetoric has contributed to rising measles cases across the country, and worried that the agency, at Kennedy’s behest, is trying to redefine measles deaths to dodge blame for the rise in cases.

“What Pennsylvania did was the traditional scientific criteria for deaths from measles,” Pallone said. “What [is the CDC] trying to do? Change that? Based on what?”