Pennsylvania confirms a seventh death tied to the nation’s worst measles outbreak in decades
An unvaccinated Montour County resident who tested positive for measles has died.
A seventh death tied to Pennsylvania’s measles outbreak, the nation’s worst in decades, was confirmed on Friday by Pennsylvania health officials. The death involved an unvaccinated person in Montour County.
The individual had tested positive for measles, and the death was reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Pennsylvania Department of Health said in a news release. Officials did not provide any additional information on the death, citing state privacy laws.
The department is still investigating an eighth death, reported by Franklin County’s coroner last month.
How Pennsylvania identifies measles-associated deaths has been the subject of intense scrutiny since officials announced in August the state’s first deaths tied to the highly contagious disease in three decades.
The CDC, under leadership of longtime anti-vaccine activist Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been slow to log measles deaths.
As of Friday, it had acknowledged only six deaths on its measles data dashboard, which does not specify where in the country they occurred. New York and Wisconsin have also reported measles-associated deaths, both involving infants, this year.
In Pennsylvania, state officials have largely declined to provide information on measles deaths beyond the patient’s county of residence and vaccination status; all other information has come from local coroners and right-to-know records requests.
The Montour County Coroner’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The central Pennsylvania county, located about 75 miles north of Harrisburg, has reported four measles cases this year out of the 1,542 cases reported statewide.
State health officials on Friday reported 61 new cases in the past seven days, continuing a trend of slowing spread in recent weeks.
Bucks County reported its first case of the year earlier this week, in an individual who had traveled to a part of central Pennsylvania where measles is circulating.
Elsewhere in the Philadelphia region, Chester County has reported 96 cases as measles spread along its western border with Lancaster County, which has reported about one-third of the state’s total cases. State officials and health experts believe the reported cases significantly undercount the full toll of the outbreak.
Measles cases have been rising nationally due to declining vaccination rates, putting the United States at risk of losing its measles elimination status from the World Health Organization. A regional division reviewed evidence from recent outbreaks around the nation this week and is expected to announce its findings early next week.
Losing the symbolic status would indicate that measles — considered eradicated in the U.S. since 2000 — is once again endemic, meaning it is spreading locally from one community to the next.
There have been 5,412 confirmed measles cases nationally as of Thursday, more than double the case count in all of 2025, according to the CDC’s measles dashboard.
Although New Jersey has not seen an outbreak this year, health officials on Friday alerted residents about a potential measles exposure at a convention and several other locations in the northern state over the last week.
An out-of-state resident infected with measles had visited LegionsCon, a convention for fans of the action figure company Four Horsemen Studios. The convention took place at the Hanover Marriott in Whippany, N.J. last weekend, health officials said.
The person also visited a Sonesta Simply Suites in Morris Plains, a Walgreens in Morristown, and the Atlantic Health Morristown Medical Center’s emergency department.
The state health department posted a list of locations and times of potential measles exposures on its website and encouraged people who believe they were exposed to measles to call their local health department or medical provider before seeking care.
In a statement posted on their Instagram page, Four Horsemen Studios wrote that the person did not know they had been exposed to measles before attending the convention, and had no signs of sickness beforehand. “Please know that NO attendees were admitted showing signs of any sickness,” the company wrote.
After the convention, the company said, the person learned that a family member had tested positive for measles — and then tested positive themselves.
New Jersey has reported two cases of measles this year, in April and October.
After seeing no measles cases for a decade, Delaware has reported 25 cases this year, all in Kent County, the central portion of the state.
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