Six young children in a nursery center in Lubbock, Texas, have tested positive for measles, a stage feared with the potential to accelerate an out of control that has spread to at least two other states.
More than a dozen other states and Washington, DC, are dealing with measles cases not related to Texas.
On Friday, the Texas State Health Department said the toll increased to 481 confirmed cases, a jump of 14% last week. Fifty -six people have been hospitalized in the area since the disease began to spread at the end of January.
In the Tiny Tots U Learning Academy, a center with approximately 230 babies, young children and children of preschool age, the outbreak began on March 24, when a girl who had been sick with fever and vomiting gave positive. Later I needed to be hospitalized for pneumonia and breathing problems.
Children who have tested positively in the nursery are between 5 and 3 years old, said Maegan Messick, co -owner of the center. None was completely vaccinated against measles.
For almost two weeks, Messick has been working with local health officials who are in contact with the centers for disease control and prevention on the situation. Messick said he has not been given a clear guide on how to handle measles in such a large nursery with so many vulnerable children.
“From what they tell me, the CDCs do not have a play book for this,” Messick said. “We have had to make trial calls.”
The United States faces the greatest measles outbreak in six years, but CDCs have remained relatively silent with the threat to public health, providing only weekly updates on their website and sending an alert to doctors last month. The agency sent 2,000 doses of the MMR vaccine to Texas Health officials on request, but has not had an informative newspaper on measles since 2019, when two large outbreaks in New York threatened to reverse the state of the United States of eliminating the virus.
A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, who is on the CDC, did not answer a question on whether any information session was in the process of addressing the current measles outbreak.
It was not clear if mass layoffs in HHS and CDC this week could hinder such efforts. But steep financing cuts to community health departments announced last week have already forced some areas to cancel vaccine clinics.
Dallas County, for example, had to cancel more than 50 clinics. Many had been planned for schools in areas with low vaccination rates.
According to a NBC news count, 628 measles cases have been reported at the national level in 2025. Other states with outbreaks include kansas with 23 cases, Oklahoma with 10 cases and New Mexico with 54 cases. Public health officials in OHIO have identified 17.
The cases at the Lubbock Nursery Center are probably linked to the epicenter of the outbreak, Gaines County, said Lubbock Public Health Director Katherine Wells.
Wells said he has been concerned about cases that extend in child care centers since the beginning of the outbreak.
“I think we will have additional outbreaks in other day care centers,” he said. “This will not be the only one.”
Messick, from the Tiny Tots U Learning Academy, said that she and her staff are trying to reduce the risk of spreading even more by observing children closely to obtain symptoms and isolate certain classrooms.
They are also urging other child care facilities to encourage their families to obtain the MMR vaccine. Families have been asked to not vaccinate their children to keep them at home for at least 21 days.
According to CDCs, two doses are enough to give life protection against measles. Non -vaccinated people who are exposed to the virus are almost safe will be infected.
The first dose is generally not administered until after a child’s first birthday, but it can be offered early, at 6 months.
“That is the best that child care owners can do right now,” said Messick. “It comes. There is no way to avoid it.”
