Measles-associated death reported in Franklin County amid ongoing Pa. outbreak
The county coroner said the death of a 39-year-old woman meets Pennsylvania’s definition of a measles-associated death.
A 39-year-old woman in Franklin County died after contracting measles, the county’s coroner reported Monday, the sixth report of a death linked to Pennsylvania’s worst measles outbreak in decades.
The woman had “several underlying conditions, including a past diagnosis of measles with treatment,” Coroner Jordan Connor said in a news release posted on Facebook. The office said it investigated the death Saturday.
It was unclear whether the woman was vaccinated against measles, and the county coroner did not specify the other underlying health conditions also present. He described the woman’s measles diagnosis as “recent.”
Pennsylvania has reported 1,136 cases of measles so far this year, the largest outbreak in the country.
State and federal officials have clashed over how to characterize the five deaths previously confirmed by Pennsylvania health officials, the most reported nationally in a single year since 1992.
State officials did not immediately comment on the release. Franklin County’s coroner did not immediately return a request for comment, but noted the death matched Pennsylvania’s reporting for deaths standard related to measles.
Pennsylvania defines a “measles-associated death” as one that occurs within 30 days of symptom onset in a person with clinical evidence of infection and a positive laboratory test, and who did not die of another unrelated cause, like a car crash.
The Franklin County coroner’s office said it would not release additional details that could identify the patient.
Measles has not been reported as widely in Franklin County, in south central Pennsylvania on the Maryland border, as in communities affected by an outbreak that has spread across more than half the state. Franklin has seen seven cases of measles so far this year.
The state has confirmed five “measles-associated deaths,” all in unvaccinated patients with confirmed measles infections, so far this year.
State officials have not provided additional information on any deaths in Pennsylvania, beyond the patient’s county of residence and vaccination status, citing privacy laws, and other details about measles-related deaths have been relayed by families and local officials.
Previously reported deaths 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.
The state also reported the death of a Lancaster County resident earlier this month.
In an interview, the family of a 20-year-old Lancaster County woman who died Sept. 25 told The Inquirer she’d been receiving treatment for leukemia. A newly wed, she was the last of nine siblings infected when measles swept through her unvaccinated family’s home at the edge of the Philadelphia suburbs, The Inquirer learned from her grandmother.
The Lancaster County woman died in Dauphin County, where she had been hospitalized, from measles pneumonia due to mixed phenotype acute leukemia, the county confirmed last week in a response to a public records request.
That woman also had other significant health conditions, the coroner noted: cytomegalovirus viremia, pancytopenia, and acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only lists two deaths on its website tracking the toll of measles outbreaks nationally, and the agency has not specified where the deaths occurred.
This follows several weeks in which the CDC omitted deaths reported in Pennsylvania under the leadership of President Donald Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist.
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