The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is struggling to keep up with requests for help from states responding to an ongoing measles outbreak, even as a large number of cases are not being reported, a senior agency scientist said Tuesday.
More than 700 measles infections have been reported nationwide, making 2025 the second-worst on record in decades. There are 561 confirmed in Texas alone since late January, according to the most recent statistics.
David Sugerman, senior scientist for the CDC’s measles response, told members of the agency’s vaccine advisory committee that Texas is pulling resources and staff away from other parts of its health department or moving them them from other regions of the state to help respond to the outbreak.
Each measles case costs anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 in public health work, Sugerman said, which “adds up quite quickly.”
The Trump administration last month cancelled more than $11 billion in public health grants to state and local health departments from the COVID-19 pandemic, some of which were being used to respond to infectious disease outbreaks.
“We are scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to support Texas and other jurisdictions,” Sugerman said. “There are quite a number of resource requests coming in, in particular from Texas. There are funding limitations in light of COVID-19 funding dissipating.”
The West Texas outbreak has predominantly centered among members of a local Mennonite community. Sugerman said more than 90 percent of the cases are “related to the Southwest outbreak, driven by transmission in close-knit, undervaccinated communities.”
He added that genetic sequencing of other cases has linked the Texas outbreak to outbreaks in Canada and Mexico, among members of the “same close-knit, undervaccinated community.”
Sugerman’s presentation during Tuesday’s meeting marked the first time any CDC official has publicly spoken about the outbreak since it began.
Two unvaccinated children in Texas have died from measles, and the death of one unvaccinated adult in New Mexico has been linked to the outbreak. The adult tested positive for measles, but the official cause of death is still under investigation. The children had no known underlying conditions.
When asked about the deaths compared to the number of infections, Sugerman said the agency suspects there are many cases not being reported. Measles normally has a fatality rate of about one to three deaths out of every 1,000 children infected.
“We do believe there is quite a large amount of cases that are not reported and underreported,” Sugerman said. “In working very closely with our colleagues in Texas, in talking with families, they may mention prior cases that have recovered and never received testing, other families that may have cases and never sought treatment. We do think there is undertesting and therefore underdiagnosis and underreporting,” he said.
Sugerman said the CDC deployed 15 people to provide on-site technical assistance in Texas, including a team from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) helping health facilities improve ventilation for infection prevention. The deployment ended April 1.
NIOSH was one of the agencies that saw hundreds of staff fired as part of the Department of Health and Human Services’ downsizing and restructuring efforts that began that same day.
The agency is sending seven more people to Texas this week, Sugerman said, and continues to make measles vaccines available to local health departments at their request. The agency is also helping standardize and expand wastewater surveillance, he said.
