Last updated: September 2026. This article is for general information and is not a substitute for personalised advice from your doctor, health visitor, paediatrician, or obstetrician. See our Editorial Policy.
Quick answer: As of August 27, 2026, the CDC has confirmed 2,903 measles cases in the US this year — already well above all of 2025 (2,289) and more than ten times 2024’s total (285). On August 25, Pennsylvania officials announced the state’s first measles-associated deaths in 35 years; one of the two people who died was a newborn in Lancaster County. What role measles played is genuinely disputed: the county coroner says the immediate cause of death was a lacerated spleen and his office’s forensic pathologist found no measles-related enlargement, while state health officials and several infectious-disease physicians say the baby wouldn’t have died without a measles infection contracted before birth. The CDC hasn’t added either death to its official count while it reviews the case. Separately, a new analysis says the US is "highly likely" to lose the measles-elimination status it’s held since 2000, with a formal decision due in November. None of that changes the one thing that actually protects a baby: MMR is a live vaccine that can’t be given during pregnancy or before 12 months old — which is exactly why everyone else around a pregnant person or a young infant being up to date matters so much right now.
Why this is the story this week
Measles has been climbing all year, but two things happened in the last week of August that turned it from a public-health chart into front-page news. First, the national case count jumped by 126 in a single week, hitting 2,903 confirmed cases across 47 states and D.C. — a total the country hasn’t seen since before measles was declared eliminated in 2000. Second, and more directly relevant to this site’s readers, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced on August 25 that the state had recorded its first measles-associated deaths in 35 years, and one of the two people who died was a newborn baby from Lancaster County — the epicenter of the country’s largest current measles outbreak. This is genuinely new ground for Parentiol: we’ve covered whooping cough and vaccine exemptions and the flu shot recommendations for this respiratory season, but not measles specifically — and this week, for the first time in a generation, that changed.
What’s actually known — and disputed — about the Pennsylvania infant death
This part matters to get right, and reasonable, well-credentialed people currently disagree on it, so here’s what’s actually been reported rather than a flattened version of it.
Both people who died were unvaccinated Lancaster County residents. Pennsylvania’s Department of Health uses the term "measles-associated" for a death when there’s laboratory or epidemiologic evidence of measles infection, even if a coroner doesn’t rule measles the immediate cause. That’s exactly the situation here: Lancaster County Coroner Dr. Stephen Diamantoni says the newborn died shortly after birth from a laceration of the spleen, and that his office’s forensic pathologist found the spleen "neither enlarged nor inflamed" — which he says argues against measles being the cause. An earlier account from the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a postmortem test on the baby’s lung tissue showed a measles infection acquired before birth.
Infectious-disease physicians who’ve reviewed the public reporting are split on how much weight to put on the spleen finding. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has said that measles can cause only mild-to-moderate spleen enlargement that’s still enough to make it vulnerable to rupture, and that it can be hard to assess after the fact whether a fragile splenic capsule was enlarged in life. Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician and Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security scholar, agrees a measles infection passed in utero could have made the organ more fragile, but notes the academic literature connecting measles directly to splenic rupture in newborns is sparse. Both experts, along with Dr. Jess Steier of Unbiased Science, are also on record saying the more pressing issue is the country’s falling MMR vaccination rates generally, not which side of this specific dispute is right.
The CDC, for its part, has explicitly not added either Pennsylvania death to its national measles fatality count while it reviews additional information — its weekly data page states that "available information does not establish whether measles caused or contributed to the deaths." There’s also an unresolved political dimension: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has publicly questioned the state’s account and accused Pennsylvania of politicizing the deaths, while the CDC has said it can’t fully assess the situation because the state hasn’t shared complete outbreak information with the agency. We’re not going to relitigate that dispute here — it doesn’t change anything about how to protect a baby — but it’s worth knowing it’s happening, since it’s part of why the exact cause of this specific death may stay unresolved for a while.
The bigger picture: cases are climbing, and elimination status is genuinely at risk
Zoom out from Pennsylvania and the national trend is stark on its own. CDC’s weekly count went from 285 cases in all of 2024, to 2,289 in all of 2025, to 2,903 already by late August 2026 — with 37 new outbreaks this year and 94% of cases linked to an outbreak rather than a single imported case. Pennsylvania’s own count illustrates how messy real-time outbreak data can get: the CDC’s national dashboard listed the state at 371 cases as of its August 21 update, while Pennsylvania’s own health department reported 497 cases days later — a reminder that state and federal numbers don’t always sync in real time, and that the true count in a fast-moving outbreak is usually a bit higher than either published figure.
A new analysis, published in The Lancet and reported by the infectious-disease outlet CIDRAP, concludes the US is "highly likely" to lose its measles-elimination status — the designation, held since 2000, meaning no continuous domestic transmission for 12 months or more. The analysis found the country has already failed 4 of the 7 CDC benchmarks used to define elimination and is unlikely to meet the rest: instead of fewer than 1 case per 10 million people a year, the US recorded more than 90 cases per 10 million in early 2026, and the estimated transmission rate stayed above 1 — meaning each infected person was, on average, infecting at least one more — on 285 of 376 days studied since January. A formal decision will be made by the Pan American Health Organization’s regional commission in November 2026. The US wouldn’t be alone: Canada lost its own elimination status in late 2025, and the UK and Spain have lost theirs in recent years too.
The underlying driver, per CDC’s own vaccination data, is falling coverage: MMR vaccination among kindergartners has dropped from 95.2% in the 2019–2020 school year to 92.4% in 2025–2026 — below the roughly 95% threshold needed for herd immunity — leaving an estimated 280,000 US kindergartners without documented protection this school year.
Why this matters more if you’re pregnant or have a baby under 1
Here’s the piece of this story that’s genuinely actionable for this site’s audience, regardless of what happens with the Pennsylvania investigation or the elimination-status review.
MMR is a live-virus vaccine, which means it can’t be given during pregnancy — CDC guidance is to wait until after delivery, and to avoid becoming pregnant for at least one month after getting the shot. If you’re planning a pregnancy and don’t know your immunity status, the window to get an MMR dose is before you conceive, not during. It’s fully safe to get vaccinated while breastfeeding, and there’s no need for routine pregnancy testing before a dose is given to someone not currently trying to conceive.
Babies, meanwhile, don’t get their first routine MMR dose until 12–15 months old, with a second dose at 4–6 years. That leaves every baby under 1 with essentially no vaccine-based protection of their own during exactly the months when they’re most vulnerable to severe illness — one of the reasons public health authorities specifically call out infants 6–11 months for an early, extra MMR dose before international travel or during a recognized local outbreak (that early dose doesn’t replace the routine two-dose series; the child still needs both doses starting at 12 months). CDC’s own data also flags pregnant women specifically as a higher-risk group for measles complications, alongside children under 5, adults over 20, and anyone immunocompromised — and measles during pregnancy raises the risk of premature birth or a low-birth-weight baby.
The severity numbers, even setting the Pennsylvania case aside entirely, are why this is worth taking seriously rather than filing under generic "back-to-school germs": about 1 in 5 unvaccinated people who get measles in the US are hospitalized; up to 1 in 20 infected children gets pneumonia, the most common cause of measles death in young children; about 1 in 1,000 develops encephalitis (brain swelling) that can cause lasting disability; and, per the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, roughly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 infected children die "even with the best care." Two doses of MMR are 97% effective at preventing infection in the first place.
What to actually do this week
If you’re pregnant and unsure whether you’re immune to measles, ask your OB for a titer (blood immunity check) now rather than waiting. If it comes back negative, you can’t get MMR until after delivery — which makes avoiding exposure and making sure the people around you are vaccinated the more relevant protection for the rest of the pregnancy.
If you have a baby under 12 months, the practical version of "cocooning" that we described for whooping cough applies here too: confirm every adult, older sibling, and regular caregiver in the household has had two documented MMR doses (or other accepted evidence of immunity), since a fully vaccinated household is the actual barrier standing between an infant too young to be vaccinated and an exposure. If you’re traveling internationally, or live in or are visiting an area with an active outbreak (Pennsylvania, Utah, Colorado, and parts of the Northeast and Midwest currently have the most active transmission — check your state health department’s page for the latest local numbers), ask your pediatrician now about an early MMR dose for a 6–11-month-old.
Know the specific warning signs before you need them, not after: call your doctor immediately for any suspected exposure or the first symptoms (high fever, cough, runny nose, red watery eyes appearing 7–14 days after contact, followed by tiny white Koplik spots inside the mouth 2–3 days later, then a rash starting at the hairline 3–5 days after that). Go to the emergency room without waiting if a baby has trouble breathing, breathes faster than normal, shows signs of dehydration (dry mouth, fewer wet diapers, crying without tears), has a fever or headache that won’t stop, seems unusually low-energy or has trouble feeding, or has any blue tinge around the mouth. If you or your baby were actually exposed and aren’t immune, call a doctor right away regardless of symptoms — MMR given within 72 hours of exposure can still reduce the odds of infection or lessen its severity, and immune globulin, given within 6 days, is an option for people (including infants and pregnant women) who can’t receive the vaccine itself.
None of this requires a special product, but if you’re the kind of parent who likes a printed reference on the fridge rather than a search history at 2am, the "when to call the doctor" sheet in our New Parent Starter Bundle covers these exact emergency thresholds alongside the other newborn warning signs worth having on hand.
The bottom line
Whatever the Lancaster County investigation ultimately concludes about the newborn’s death, and whatever the Pan American Health Organization decides about US elimination status in November, the number that matters most for a family right now is 2,903 and climbing — the largest measles total the country has seen since before elimination was declared in 2000. For anyone pregnant or caring for a baby under 1, the response isn’t complicated, even if it’s not glamorous: check your own MMR immunity and get vaccinated before conceiving if you’re not already protected, make sure everyone else in your baby’s world is up to date, and know the specific emergency signs above so you’re not guessing if the moment ever comes.
Sources
- CDC — Measles Cases and Outbreaks (updated August 30, 2026)
- CDC — Measles Symptoms and Complications (updated August 5, 2026)
- CDC — Measles Vaccination (updated April 29, 2026)
- CDC — Measles: What to Do If You Get Sick or Exposed (updated August 5, 2026)
- CIDRAP — Measles-related deaths in Pennsylvania mark first 2 US fatalities this year
- CIDRAP — Newborn one of 2 measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania
- CIDRAP — Conflicting information continues in measles-associated death of Pennsylvania newborn
- CIDRAP — US ‘highly likely’ to lose measles elimination status this fall, analysis warns
- Pennsylvania Department of Health — Measles
- Parentiol — Whooping Cough Isn’t Spiking Nationally in 2026 — But Record Vaccine Exemptions Mean Your Child’s Classroom Risk Just Went Up
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