US Measles Cases Surpass All of 2025's Total With Five Months Still Left in the Year
The CDC had logged 2,318 measles cases by July 23, already above 2025's full-year total of 2,289, as national vaccination rates remain below the outbreak threshold.
Editor's Note ·
- Correction:
- The article quotes Healthline as saying the United States "is at risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it has held for the past quarter-century." This exact sentence does not appear in the source. Healthline actually contains two separate sentences — a summary line reading "The United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it has held since 2000," and a body sentence reading "The United States is poised to lose its measles exemption status, which it has held for the past quarter-century." The article's quotation combines clauses from both. The underlying fact (the US elimination status, held since 2000, is at risk) is accurate and supported by the source.
Overview
The number of measles cases in the United States has surpassed the full-year total for 2025, with five months still remaining in 2026, according to STAT News, citing the Associated Press. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had logged 2,318 measles cases as of July 23 — the Thursday before the report’s July 24 publication — according to STAT News, above the 2,289 cases recorded in “the worst year for measles in more than three decades”: 2025. Healthline independently confirmed the milestone using a different count, reporting that the Johns Hopkins U.S. Measles Tracker had already logged 2,295 cases as of July 21 — also above the 2025 total.
As previously reported by The Machine Herald in May, the country was already on pace to break the 2025 record. It has now done so: 2026 has become, according to STAT News, “the U.S.’s worst year for measles since 1991.”
What We Know
Vaccination rates remain below the outbreak-prevention threshold. MMR vaccination coverage among kindergartners fell to 92.5% in the 2024-25 school year, down from 95.2% in 2019-20, according to STAT News — below the roughly 95% coverage needed to prevent outbreaks. The U.S. eliminated local measles spread in 2000 by maintaining high vaccination rates, STAT News reported.
Three states account for most of the outbreak. South Carolina, Utah, and Arizona have seen the major outbreaks driving the 2026 total, which have “sickened hundreds” between them, with smaller clusters in other states, per STAT News. South Carolina — which STAT News described as having “the nation’s largest outbreak in 35 years” — reached 997 cases concentrated in Spartanburg County, before the state’s Department of Public Health declared the outbreak over on April 26, Healthline reported. In Utah, where officials have been responding to measles for more than a year, the virus has sickened more than 700 people over that period, according to STAT News; the state’s Department of Health and Human Services separately confirmed 514 measles cases within 2026 itself, per Healthline.
Officials say the real total is likely higher than what’s reported. South Carolina’s acting director of the state department of health, Dr. Brannon Traxler, said the undercount there is “impossible to know and may vary during the course of an outbreak,” according to STAT News. Dr. Varun Shetty, Texas’ chief state epidemiologist, said “what we’re able to count and report is almost always an underestimate of what actually occurred, because it relies on people being willing to be able to get tested, to share information with healthcare providers and with public health. Sometimes that just doesn’t happen,” STAT News reported. Rémy Pasco, a mathematical epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the undercounts were unsurprising given how far community vaccination rates sit below the roughly 95% threshold, adding “there’s just not much you can do about measles once you have it,” per STAT News.
The elimination status the US has held since 2000 is at risk. “The United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status, which it has held for the past quarter-century,” Healthline reported.
What We Don’t Know
The true scale of the outbreak remains uncertain. STAT News reports that in Texas, researchers are still working to estimate the actual size of the state’s 2025 outbreak, with early findings suggesting it may have been “nearly twice the size of the 762 known cases” — Texas health officials previously found that 182 probable cases in Gaines County, the epicenter of that outbreak, went unconfirmed for lack of information, leaving a confirmed county total of 414.
It is also not yet clear how this new milestone will factor into the formal elimination-status determination, which, as previously reported, rests with a Pan American Health Organization review that weighs whether transmission chains trace back to a limited number of imported cases rather than sustained domestic spread.
Analysis
Two independent counts — the CDC’s official tally, reported through STAT News, and the Johns Hopkins U.S. Measles Tracker, reported through Healthline — now agree that the U.S. has surpassed the case record set just a year ago, despite different reporting dates and different running totals. That convergence, more than either single figure, is what turns “on pace to break the record” into a record already broken, five months before the year is even over. With multiple state epidemiologists on record saying their own tallies likely understate the real total, the full scope of the 2026 outbreak may not be clear until well after the counting catches up with the outbreaks themselves.