Great. Just great.
Seventeen measles cases have been reported in El Paso, including 13 at the Camp East Montana Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, health officials said Thursday.
The four community cases in El Paso aren’t connected to the cases at Camp East Montana, city spokesperson Laura Cruz-Acosta said.
The cases at the ICE detention center are outside the city’s jurisdiction and reported through federal authorities, the El Paso Department of Public Health said in a news release. City health officials are coordinating with federal partners and have provided testing support and vaccines for prevention efforts, the release states.
U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said the measles outbreak at ICE’s largest detention facility is no surprise.
“This public health crisis is a direct result of the manner in which Acquisition Logistics operates the facility: an explicit effort to maximize profits at the expense of federal standards for services such as medical attention,” she said. “Such an inexperienced, incompetent private prison corporation does not share our community’s interests or those of the detainees. For these reasons and more, I continue my calls for Camp East Montana to be shut down and Acquisition Logistics to be investigated.”
Earlier this month, two cases of tuberculosis and 18 cases of COVID-19 were identified at the ICE detention facility, which is located on Fort Bliss.
The ICE Health Services Corps quarantined all people suspected of having contact with people with measles, and ceased all movement within Camp East Montana to control further spread of the disease, Lauren Bis, deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement to El Paso Matters.
“Medical staff is continuing to monitor the detainees’ conditions and will take appropriate and active steps to prevent further infection. All detainees are being provided with proper medical care,” the statement said.
There is of course no reason to believe a word of that statement. The best I’d hope for is that the spread can be contained. We haven’t done a good job of that lately.
The U.S. has officially surpassed 1,000 cases of measles in 2026. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest disease tally reveals that, as of February 26, 1,136 people have confirmed measles infections. What that means is that, in just two months, the national total is already nearing half of all the 2,281 confirmed cases reported in 2025.
Measles is a vaccine-preventable viral disease that is both extremely contagious and potentially deadly. The U.S. was declared measles-free in 2000, but experts say that achievement is all but certain to be reversed. The rate of infections this year is accelerating at a much faster pace than even during the outbreak that began in West Texas in 2025. The spike has alarmed public health experts, many of whom blame the disease’s resurgence on declining rates of vaccination against measles.
“Hitting 1,000 [cases] in February is unprecedented, but it’s not because there’s something new about the virus or disease like when there’s new strains of flu. It’s unprecedented because of how preventable it is,” says Amy Winter, a demographer and epidemiologist at the College of Public Health at the University of Georgia. “This is 100 percent a reflection of the recent declines in vaccination rates.”
The CDC’s numbers are likely an undercount, and there are likely many more cases in the U.S. going undetected or unreported. Most of the confirmed cases—90 percent—are linked to upsurges across more than a dozen states, with a relentless outbreak in South Carolina fueling the majority of infections this year. On February 27 South Carolina’s public health department reported 985 total cases since the fall of 2025; 919 of those cases were in people who did not receive the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine.
Last year 11 percent of people who caught measles were hospitalized.
And adding to the challenge is that because we had done such a good job up until recently of preventing measles, we don’t have much experience in treating it.
As U.S. hospitals face an increasing risk of encountering measles, and pressure to immediately spot it, health care workers face an unusual barrier: Many don’t know what it looks like.
“There’s a word, ‘morbilliform’ — it means measles-like, and there are lots of viruses that can cause a rash that looks like a measles rash in children,” said Theresa Flynn, a pediatrician in Raleigh and the president of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. In 30 years in health care, she’s never seen a measles case, she said.
[…]
Infectious disease experts and doctors said federal policies have left health care workers to lean on their own experience or guidance from their state public health systems to fight a disease that many are preparing to see for the first time and that initially may behave like the common cold.
“As measles becomes more common, all of us are leveling up in our ability to recognize and immediately respond to suspected measles,” Flynn said.
[…]
Most U.S. clinics and hospitals have never experienced measles cases, said Patsy Stinchfield, a former president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a nurse practitioner. She called CMS’ Immediate Jeopardy penalty for Mission “extreme,” given the virus can be so difficult to identify.
“In the middle of winter right now, measles looks like every other viral respiratory infection that kids come in with,” Stinchfield said.
The CDC has been less communicative in the past year with clinics about their response to outbreaks, said health workers and infectious disease experts. This disconnect began soon after Trump took office, according to a KFF Health News investigation finding that health officials in West Texas were unable to talk with CDC scientists as measles surged last February and March.
“We certainly do not feel the support or guidance from the CDC right now,” said Brigette Fogleman, a pediatrician at Asheville Children’s Medical Center, where staff members have come up with their own method of staving off the virus: screening patients over the phone and in their cars before a visit.
In response to questions about how the CDC is supporting health care organizations during the measles resurgence, spokesperson Andrew Nixon said that “state and local health departments have the lead in investigating measles cases and outbreaks” and that the CDC provides support “as requested.” He pointed to numerous guides and simulation tools the agency has developed as the virus has spread.
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, acknowledged that diagnosing measles is a major challenge, emphasizing that coordination among public health agencies is critical in overcoming that challenge.
Stinchfield attributed the spread of measles to CDC leaders’ lack of communication to clinics and to the public — no ads on buses, no social media campaigns, no sense of urgency. “When you are at the highest level of measles cases in 30 years, we should be seeing lots more from our federal government,” Stinchfield said. “And I think it’s harming kids and causing an inordinate amount of work and expense that really doesn’t belong in health care right now.”
I’m sure the CDC under the brain worm guy will handle this as well as DHS under the puppy murderer lady will handle the outbreak at Camp East Montana. And on that happy note, I’m going to lie down on the couch and watch some mindless television.