By Rich McKay

(Reuters) – The first person known to have died from measles in the U.S. in a decade was announced by health officials on Wednesday and described as a “school-aged child” who perished in a children’s hospital in West Texas, as a Texas outbreak has grown from a handful of cases to more than 130 across two states.

The child was not vaccinated against the disease, the Texas health department said in a statement on Wednesday. Media accounts say the child died at a Lubbock, Texas hospital overnight.

At least 124 people were known to be infected in West Texas since early February, Texas health officials announced, most of them children.

An additional 9 cases were announced on Tuesday, in eastern New Mexico, near the Texas state line where the outbreak has spread to about 10 counties, Texas health officials said.

The U.S. death rate from measles, a highly contagious airborne disease, is 1 to 3 deaths out of every 1,000 reported cases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The last U.S. measles death was in 2015, according to the CDC.

A spokesperson for the Texas Department of Health Services was not immediately available to Reuters for comment, but the agency said in a release that 18 people were hospitalized with the disease.

The CDC was also not immediately available for comment.

Lara Anton, a Texas health department spokesperson, told a local ABC affiliate that the ongoing outbreak has hit mostly small children and teenagers, and that the cases were originally concentrated in a “close-knit, under vaccinated” rural Mennonite community in Gaines County, where children are largely home-schooled.

“It’s all a personal choice, and you can do whatever you want. It’s just that the community doesn’t go and get regular healthcare,” Anton told ABC.

At this time, it is unclear how the first person was exposed, and there is no indication that any early patients traveled outside the United States, Anton told the multiple media.

“This will accelerate for a while,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, and a frequent target of the anti-vaccine campaign.

“It’s a bad illness,” he said, noting that about 20 percent of cases are hospitalized. “Unfortunately, Texas is the epicenter of it because of our very aggressive anti-vaccine movement,” he said.

Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, meaning there was no continuous transmission of the disease for a year.

In recent years, federal health officials have attributed some outbreaks to U.S. parents refusing to vaccinate their children, Reuters previously reported.

In 2024, there were 285 cases of the disease in the U.S. from 16 outbreaks, up from 59 cases from four outbreaks in 2023.

Texas health officials announced on Monday that more people were likely exposed to the virus after a contagious Gaines County resident traveled to several locations in and around San Antonio, nearly 400 miles away.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; additional reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; editing by Caroline Humer and Bill Berkrot)

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