CDC sends a ‘disease detective’ to Pennsylvania as measles cases top 1,200
A Health and Human Services official said the federal agency is sending a “disease detective” to Pennsylvania later this week at the state’s request.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will send a “disease detective” to Pennsylvania this week to help address an ongoing measles outbreak that has now sickened more than 1,200 people across the state, an official with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said.
The state requested the assistance of the CDC’s Epi-Aid program, part of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which provides short-term technical assistance and subject matter expertise during health crises.
Epi-Aid experts typically work with a state for one to three weeks to provide technical assistance investigating an “urgent public health problem,” according to the CDC’s website.
Pennsylvania has the worst measles outbreak in the country in more than three decades.
In the last week, the state reported 157 new cases. The outbreak is centered in Lancaster County and has spread across the state, including into Chester County in the Philadelphia suburbs.
In addition to the expert assistance, federal health officials have provided nearly $4 million in one-time funding to “support measles response operations” through most of 2027, an HHS official said.
The CDC will “continue working closely with Pennsylvania health officials to provide the expertise and support needed to respond to the outbreak and protect public health,” HHS press secretary Grace Davis Jamison wrote in an email.
Pennsylvania’s request for federal help has been complicated by a highly politicized dispute around the reporting of deaths linked to measles.
Since late August, when the state reported its first two deaths associated with the highly contagious virus, President Donald Trump’s HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has questioned the validity of the state’s death reporting.
He and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro have accused each other of politicizing the deaths. Shapiro claims that Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccination activist, spread misinformation that decreased vaccination rates and made Pennsylvania vulnerable to a measles outbreak.
Kennedy and CDC Director Erica Schwartz recommend vaccination as the most effective way to prevent measles, the HHS statement noted.
Under Kennedy’s direction, the CDC for weeks omitted measles-associated deaths from its measles data dashboard.
HHS representatives also said the state had not been cooperating with the federal agency, noting that Pennsylvania had not requested assistance through Epi-Aid as other states had.
Before requesting Epi-Aid assistance, Pennsylvania health officials said they were already working closely with CDC staff.
Last month, Pennsylvania health officials said they would accept Epi-Aid help if the CDC acknowledged the deaths reported in the state, which now total five confirmed by the state. A sixth death, reported this week by a coroner in Franklin County, remains under state investigation.
But the CDC’s data dashboard still reflected only two measles deaths this year nationally as of Wednesday, without noting the location.
The agency says it is working to establish a standard definition for measles deaths and in the meantime will report “measles-caused deaths” when the National Center for Health Statistics identifies measles as the underlying cause of a death, based on information from death records submitted by states.
Public health experts have noted that this process is a departure from previous death reporting protocols and often takes weeks longer.
State officials did not immediately return a request for comment.
Latest measles case counts
On Wednesday, Pennsylvania health officials reported that 1,222 people in nearly two-thirds of the state’s counties have contracted measles so far in 2026.
Health experts say this number is likely an undercount, as not all measles cases are reported to the state.
About one in five of the reported measles cases required hospitalization.
Lancaster County remains at the epicenter of the outbreak, with 443 cases reported this year. Chester County has seen 90 cases, while Mifflin County, in central Pennsylvania, has reported 183.
Health officials said in a news release that healthcare providers around the state have seen a “surge of interest” in MMR vaccines as the outbreak has worsened.
Providers administered more than 56,000 vaccines in September — more than double those given out in a typical month — and have already given out more than 23,000 vaccines in the first two weeks of October.
-
Your questions about Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak, answered
-
New vaccination data show hundreds of Philly-area schools vulnerable to a measles outbreak
-
Chester County has more measles cases than most entire states in the country
-
Pa. measles outbreak is nation’s worst, echoing deadly 1991 Philadelphia epidemic
