The Texas outbreak may be over, but there are other outbreaks out there.
One of the largest measles outbreaks in the U.S. is now centered in bordering areas of southwestern Utah and Arizona.
In Southwest Utah, all but one of the 27 confirmed cases are among unvaccinated, school-age kids, the Southwest Utah Public Health Department reported. In Mohave County, Arizona, which health officials believe is connected to the Utah outbreak, there have been 42 confirmed cases of the highly contagious virus.
An NBC News investigation, done in collaboration with Stanford University, has found that much of the United States doesn’t have the vaccine protection to prevent outbreaks of communicable diseases such as measles.
About 79% of kindergartners in Washington County, Utah, are vaccinated against measles, according to NBC News data. That’s only slightly higher than rates in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the 2025 outbreak earlier this year — and well below the 95% level of herd immunity experts say is needed to protect against an outbreak.
“I’ve worked for this health department for about 18 years, and we’ve never seen a case of measles that I know of up until this point,” said David Heaton, the public information officer for the Southwest Utah Public Health Department. “We are just at that low rate of (vaccine) uptake that does leave us open for this kind of an outbreak.”
Heaton said many community members were vaccine-hesitant before the pandemic, but Covid mandates made some people even more reluctant to get their shots.
“About a month ago, we started getting cases where we could see evidence of community spread, meaning that there was measles being passed on the ground in our five-county district,” said Heaton.
Cases have been steadily increasing in the district of more than 287,000 people and more are expected, health officials said.
The Mohave County Department of Public Health, which borders Utah, first announced a case on Aug. 12. Of the 42 confirmed cases, one child has been hospitalized.
In a statement, the Arizona Department of Health Services said that it’s working closely with officials in Mohave and Utah in a coordinated response to the ongoing outbreak. “This is the highest number of cases we have seen since the 1990s.”
The Arizona outbreak is primarily in Colorado City and the surrounding area, which is separated geographically from the rest of the state by the Grand Canyon. The rural area, which was founded in the 1930s and associated with fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs, has a history of isolation.
“This is exactly what you expect to see when you have a highly infectious vaccine-preventable disease drop into a community with low vaccination rates, almost inevitable,” said Dr. Bob England, a former Arizona public health official affiliated with The Arizona Partnership for Immunization.
As of the 2024-25 school year, not a single school in Mohave County had kindergarten classes with herd immunity protection against measles.
Different states, same story. The total number so far is a lot smaller than what we saw in Texas, but this one is still new and the potential for growth is there. I wish everyone who is working to stop this all the best, and I wish everyone who has a kid they haven’t vaccinated would come to their senses.