The measles outbreak that started small and rural in Utah last June is now sickening hundreds in the Beehive state’s urban corridor.
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Utah has updated its measles case count. There have now been 583 cases since last summer. Only Texas and South Carolina have had more measles cases since the beginning of last year. Utah’s outbreak started in a remote corner of the state but has since been spreading in its populous urban corridor. Sean Higgins, with member station KUER, has more.
SEAN HIGGINS, BYLINE: The student center at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City is buzzing with activity. Busy students grab food, chat with friends or get in a quick game of ping-pong or bowl before their next class.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Woo-hoo.
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HIGGINS: You wouldn’t know it, but the school is currently dealing with a measles exposure. Someone with a confirmed case of the disease was on campus for at least four days at the end of March. The university told students to stay home for 21 days if they’re not vaccinated due to the highly contagious nature of measles. Freshman Hailey Perkins, who was vaccinated as a child, says she isn’t really thinking about it.
HAILEY PERKINS: And I was like, I don’t really know what you change. Like, I still have to go to class, so I was just like, it is what it is.
HIGGINS: Utah’s outbreak took off in the Southwest in small communities near the Arizona border. People there are known for being highly religious and having a low vaccination rate. Almost half of Utah’s measles cases came from that region. State epidemiologist Dr. Leisha Nolen says while the outbreak started small, it’s quickly spreading.
LEISHA NOLEN: It is now hitting people from all different areas of the state with all different practices, from all different kinds of communities. It isn’t limited to any specific group anymore.
HIGGINS: In February, there were exposures at a high school wrestling tournament an hour south of Salt Lake City, and the disease began actively spreading in Salt Lake County. The State Health Department says 83% of cases are among unvaccinated people. Children are outpacing adults by a near 2-to-1 margin. Measles is more dangerous for children under 5. Severe complications can lead to fever, pneumonia or brain swelling.
The disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but it experienced a surge in cases starting in 2025. Public health experts say rhetoric and new policies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are fostering vaccine skepticism and confusion by not encouraging vaccination. For public health officials like Nolen, the last year and a half has felt like navigating uncharted waters.
NOLEN: As a pediatrician doing training in the late ’90s, early thousands, I didn’t learn about measles. It was something that maybe you’d see if you went internationally. You certainly didn’t expect to see it here in the United States.
HIGGINS: David Heaton is with the Southwest Utah Public Health Department. He says trust in public health in his conservative, religious region took a serious hit during the COVID years, and he’s still working on getting correct vaccine information out to the public. But he says there has been a glimmer of hope in his corner of the state.
DAVID HEATON: We do still see that people have a little more trust in local public health, and so we’re leveraging that as much as we can, again, to reach out to people, to at least give them education. Our big thing is personal responsibility.
HIGGINS: Heaton stresses the importance of actual conversations with local health care providers.
HEATON: We respect anyone that has worries or doubts or questions. We hope they would talk to their doctor, but to be aware that there’s a lot of information on the internet that take kind of that fear approach, that you’re endangering your child and making certain health care claims that really are unfounded.
HIGGINS: Despite the outreach, state epidemiologist Leisha Nolen says she doesn’t know when the outbreak will end. She’s hoping that things might get better now that it’s springtime and people are spending less time inside. For NPR News, I’m Sean Higgins in Salt Lake City.
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