The West Texas measles outbreak has ended
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Are the outbreaks all originating from the Texas one, or spontaneous? "Linked to cases" doesn't tell me. Is it the source of ALL the cases, or only 10% of them, or what?
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But JD "two faced" Vance agreed that he should be rehired, despite the anti-East Indian bigotry. Note that Vance's wife has East Indian parents, but he is basically silly putty that will fit into any shape. He is willing to even lie about egg prices while holding evidence that contradicts his lies. Small wonder he has had 4 names, and uses cosmetics while insisting that he doesn't. He is quite desperately, always trying to be someone else.
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I'm in that cohort of people who may have received vaccines which were not as effective as desired. So I, too, got an MMR booster this last Spring. (I live in the Dallas area.) The pharmacist was completely understanding.
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Ah, yes,
Edit: I can't blame too much blood in my caffeine stream at this time of the morning!
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Would that be because of age and getting a very early vaccine that didnt work that well yet?
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Except that DeSantis could not hide the fact that people were dying of COVID-19, and he wasn't trying to hide the fact that some people were still dying. He just wanted to reduce those numbers so he could down play the problem.
If Texas proclaimed there were no measles cases, we'd likely hear about the fact that they are lying to us. People will talk, especially given the deaths of children are unusual. The claim of no cases is far harder to hide.
The most likely thing is that we have a much higher than normal undercount than normal of cases in this area, and that the outbreak in Texas is over because it's burned through enough of the population to restore herd immunity.
Keep in mind even when the population falls below herd immunity levels, there is still a very large portion of the population that is already immune. Either because they grew up before the vaccine, or because they got the vaccine (even if they're not giving it to their kids).
This is what you'd expect without vaccines. Measles would cycles through areas every few years. So having a major outbreak and then having it burn out is exactly what you'd expect if you didn't do anything and had no effective public health response.
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Apparently, ordering numbered items is too difficult for some. Item numbers 6 and 8 are quite obviously out of place. "Obviously" apparently not being obvious to some. Canada retains its number 10 spot, though so it's all fine.
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Could be, but there is a lot of anti-vax sentiment in a lot of Canada too (it just doesn't control the central government). Has been for years, but accelerated with COVID. Especially in Western Canada, which often tries to ask Texas and Idaho to hold their beer.
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"No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot." -- Mark Twain
Remember, about 40% of the Texas adults consider the Noah's Ark fantasy to be a true story.
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I'm not in Texas, but it spurred my doctor to recommend an MMR booster or checking on immunity. I checked my immunity levels, because I likely as a small child had a reaction to the MMR shot. (I did receive a measles only booster in elementary school that never shows up on public health records, so I had to get that added into my health records.)
This was prompted by the Texas outbreak spreading.
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Yet the Texas neighboring states are still seeing more infections. So all of Texas suddenly got immunity all at once? The probability seem rather low, since Texas was the original epicenter.
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The "J" is for James, not John. It's the only part of his name that has not changed.
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Several coroners in Missouri admitted ~2022 that they had stopped reporting COVID19 deaths, putting heart failure or congestive heart failure on the death certificates.
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Thanks for the correction; previous comment edited. I had known that and don't know why I typed "John" there.
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You'd actually expect Texas to be the first place for this to burn out, because it was the epicenter. It is where about half the reported cases have occurred. This is also a region where underreporting probably is higher than average due to hostility to public health measures.
On top of that, it isn't all of Texas. It is centered on a number of very sparsely populated counties in Western Texas, where immunity levels are far below that of the state as a whole. Keep in mind, the vast majority of kids in Texas are still receiving the vaccine. Most of the older generations had a higher vaccination rate or got measles when they were a child.
This is the type of pattern of spread you'd see in diseases like measles before vaccines. You have cycles of outbreaks that burn themselves out. Then in a few years you have another major outbreak in the area.
Having talked to the older people in my family, they talk about certain summers, for instance not being allowed to go to the pool because of polio outbreaks. It wasn't every summer, but for specific summers they weren't allowed to go.
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That is certainly one possibility. I prefer evidence to conjecture.
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This may be correct. Assume that the outbreak lasts for x days. So if it started two weeks later in a neighbouring state it might end two weeks later. We don’t know. On the other hand, they might be lying as well.
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No, they got immunity over time as they got sick and recovered (or, in two cases, died). The graph of when cases developed their rashes shows the usual epidemic curve: exponential growth, then a curve down, — figure 5 here:
https://www.dshs.texas.gov/news-alerts/measles-outbreak-2025
The text says there’s ongoing transmission because of ten cases that developed a rash less than a week ago, but that seems to be old text they didn’t update; there’s zero new cases since July.
But maybe you’re right, and John Abbott is actually a supergenius who can manage to cover up a highly infectious disease.
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Ironic that you’d post this without realizing who it might apply to.
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Not all the outbreaks currently happening in the US trace back to Texas, but most of them do (although several steps my be required to make the link, such as person in Kansas gets measles from someone else in Kansas, who got it from a friend who visited New Mexico and was infected there by a person there who had gone to west Texas and became infected). Once an outbreak becomes widespread enough, it can be very difficult to trace each new case back to an original source.
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Thing is, following measles there is always an increase in morbidity and mortality due to immune amnesia (mostly) and SSPE (much rarer, but a lot harder to spin.) Measles does horrrible things to the body, and the ripples continue for months to years following infection.
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This is one of the reasons why measles
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In countries with high vaccine coverage there’s no outbreaks. Almost all cases are imported (visitors or locals returning from elsewhere), with the very occasional local case directly linked to the imported case.
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Yes, there are. Basically, it means more cases than expected. A waterborne disease outbreak is two cases or more. CDC still defines these words correctly (WHO and here).
Your second contention is true, though.
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Your second WHO link, the one that says it’s two people, is about campylobacter.
For measles, the definition appears to be five cases under the WHO definition, and three cases under the CDC (or NIH, or both, unclear) and the PHAC definitions. So a small family can count.
Epidemiologists seem to only get excited when a transmission chain hits about 20 or 30 people, which is what I had in mind. If you’ve got that many, then you’ve got a problem with vaccination rates. For several years after the 2000 elimination in the U.S. and Canada, there were no such large outbreaks. They started popping up in the early 2010s, and are becoming common now.
COVID seems to have set back the growth in outbreak size by a few years — in the U.S., 2019 is the previous record, almost as bad as 2025 so far, with 2020-2024 much lower than 2019. But it seems long COVID is going to start really biting now, having gotten an anti-vaccine government voted in.
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I have no opinion on whether Texas's reporting is accurate, but while Canada's nationwide population density is low compared to the US, most of its population is concentrated in a few small areas, i.e. not all those islandy-fjordy bits. ;-)
It's probably more illustrative to look at a population density map, though I haven't looked into whether US & Canadian measles cases have been in dense or sparse communities. Here's a 2020 population density map of North America from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, based on Gridded Population of the World, Version 4 (GPWv4): Population Density, Revision 11.
(GPWv4 came out in 2018, so the 2020 map is an estimate. I don't know when revision 11 came out, or what the revisions generally entail)
And this is a 2014 map just of Canada that also shows internal borders and several cities/towns, that I found on Wikipedia:
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Fatalities are difficult to under-report but fatalities can be classified as something other than the true cause. For several years in the 1980s and 90s, in several parishes (counties) in Louisiana there were no suicides. The deaths were classified as unintentional or unknown intent. There are several parishes in southern Louisiana where the vast majority of the population is of the Catholic religion. Only a few parishes require the coroner to be a physician — or any education requirements at all. Suicide is considered a Mortal Sin in the Catholic religion and has implications for the spiritual soul. When questioned about the absence of suicides in reported vital statistics, the several coroners expressed concern that they a mere mortal could be not only denying the deceased a proper resting place but even their place in heaven. Even after enlisting the aid of a bishop who said that the coroner’s opinion mattered little, the no-suicides classification policy continued for years. (I personally suspected that the policy was more because the office of coroner is an elected position and the incumbent was fearful of unhappy families affect on their future electability.)
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In the big crayon box, is that somewhere between "rust" and "burnt umber"? Or it could be a slightly off-putting blue...
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Doesn't even need that. All it takes is a coroner willing to list the cause of death as heart stoppage or the like--which all deaths include--regardless of an underlying disease or other contributing cause, with the plausible defense that the disease was never diagnosed. even if intentionally not.
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