A school -age child died of measles in western Texas, the first death from the disease in a decade in the United States. The child had not been vaccinated against measles, according to the Department of Health of the city of Lubbock.
Death, confirmed by Katherine Wells, director of Public Health of the Department of Health of Lubbock, is part of a rapid movement outbreak that is infected at least 124 people, mostly children, in the rural areas of western Texas.
The official count of the people who have been hospitalized are 18, according to the Department of Health Services of the State of Texas.
That number is not updated, said Dr. Lara Johnson, pediatrician and medical director of the Covenant Children's Hospital in Lubbock.
Johnson said in an email that his team has worried about “about 20” children with measles so far.
All those children, he said, were admitted because they had problems breathing. None had been vaccinated against measles.
The outbreak has been limited so far to parts of Texas that border New Mexico. That State has also reported nine measles cases, but the authorities have not said if they are connected.
It is not clear how the outbreak originated.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health Services of the Texas State Department told NBC News that genotype tests had linked the outbreak with a measles virus tension called D8 that currently circulate in Europe and the Mediterranean region of the East of the World Health Organization, which includes countries in North Africa, the Middle East and Southwest of Asia. None of the samples have been linked to the vaccine.
This is the first measles death that will be reported in the USA since 2015, when a Washington woman died. Health officials at that time said that he had probably been exposed in a clinic in a rural part of the state that was experiencing an outbreak.
Measles was considered eliminated in the USA. In 2000 due to the general use of the measles-pothubella (MMR) measles vaccine, according to the centers for disease control and prevention.
Two doses of the shot are 97% effective to prevent disease.
