A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
A second child in Texas has died of measles, according to state health officials.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attended the child's funeral on Sunday and identified the child as 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand. Until this year, the United States had not reported a measles death for nearly a decade. Now an outbreak centered in Texas has 481 confirmed cases.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR's Maria Godoy has been following all of this for us. So, Maria, the second child to die of measles this year. We've learned that she died on Thursday. What else do we know about her?
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Well, Texas health officials say the girl was not vaccinated and had no reported underlying health conditions. She was hospitalized after getting sick with measles. And she died from what doctors described as measles pulmonary failure, which basically means the lungs can't really provide enough oxygen anymore.
MARTÍNEZ: And is this a common complication from the measles?
GODOY: You know, measles is a respiratory illness. And it can often lead to serious lung complications, including pneumonia, superinfections of the lung, as well as other complications like brain swelling. Vaccines work so well that many of us have forgotten just how devastating measles can be. This latest death serves as a terrible reminder.
MARTÍNEZ: So how worried should people be for the possibility of more deaths?
GODOY: Well, before the measles vaccines were developed in the early 1960s, measles used to kill 400 to 500 people in this country every year. Even now, about one or two out of every 1,000 measles cases are fatal. I spoke with Dr. Adam Ratner. He's a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York, and he is unfortunately not surprised by these fatalities.
ADAM RATNER: Every time a child gets the measles, you roll the dice, and you have a 1-in-1,000 or a 2-in-1,000 chance of that child dying. So it's not surprising that in an outbreak of this size, that we are starting to see deaths.
GODOY: Ratner says these are deaths that vaccines could prevent, and vaccination rates have been trending downwards nationwide for several years. He says, especially in areas like Gaines County, Texas, where the outbreak is centered and where vaccination rates are just above 80%, that just sets the stage for outbreaks because measles is extraordinarily contagious.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. How's the Trump administration responding to all this?
GODOY: Well, Secretary Kennedy traveled to Texas on Sunday. He said the CDC is deploying teams to Texas to help with the outbreak. And he called the measles vaccine, quote, "the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles." And that is notable because in prior statements, he's called vaccines a personal choice. But in another post Sunday, Kennedy praised doctors' use of treatments that have no evidence to support them when it comes to measles.
And, you know, meanwhile, President Trump was asked about the outbreak on Sunday night. He downplayed the size, but he said if it progresses, the U.S. will have to take what he called very strong action. And I should note that we are seeing these outbreaks at a time when the administration has moved to cut more than $11 billion in public health funding to states.
MARTÍNEZ: So, Maria, I mean, what's - what now with measles in the U.S.?
GODOY: Well - so measles was declared eliminated in this country in 2000, but this year, we have five states where measles is currently spreading. In fact, the U.S. has already seen more than 600 measles cases this year. That's more than double the number of cases it reported in all of last year, and it's only April.
MARTÍNEZ: That's NPR's Maria Godoy. Thank you very much, Maria.
GODOY: My pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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