U.S. measles cases surge as vaccination rates drop

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• 00:01

  For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pierre-Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.

• 00:21

  It feels increasingly difficult to go a day without hearing about yet another outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease.

• 00:27

  In 2024, pertussis, also known as whooping cough, suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

• 00:32

  Last year, the nation recorded the most measles cases since the illness was declared eliminated in the U.S.

• 00:37

  In 2000.

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  And of course, measles outbreaks have grown increasingly common.

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  While it 's clear these disease outbreaks are driven by a decline in vaccination rates,

• 00:45

  we wanted to better understand why people are n't getting vaccinated,

• 00:48

  how that impacts public health, And what, if anything, we can do about it?

• 00:53

  So today we're joined by Lauren Young, SIAM's Associate Editor for Health and Medicine, to dig into the subject.

• 00:59

  Thanks for joining us.

• 01:01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 01:02

  So you spent several weeks looking into what's been driving measles outbreaks across the United States.

• 01:08

  Yeah.

• 01:08

  So this has been happening since 2025.

• 01:10

  We saw this sort of escalation happen in Texas.

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  And we've just since then been seeing measles outbreaks in multiple states from Texas, Arizona, South Carolina.

• 01:19

  And we've been seeing this recent spike happening in Utah and Florida.

• 01:23

  So since 2025, we 've been just seeing, again,

• 01:27

  this escalation in this disease that 's been considered virtually eliminated from the U.S.

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