US measles cases hit 35-year record with months left in 2026

The United States has now reported the most measles cases in any year since 1991, not only surpassing all of last year’s record total, but also reaching the highest level in 35 years, with more than five months still remaining in 2026.

The country reported 2,295 cases as of Tuesday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University’s U.S. measles tracker. The total surpasses last year’s 2,289 cases and is the highest annual count since the highly contagious disease was eliminated in the United States in 2000.

“The fact that we’ve reached this total this early in the year is really a reflection of those large outbreaks earlier in the year, particularly in South Carolina and Utah,” said William Moss, a professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s very frustrating. This is a reflection that we have been unable to stop measles virus transmission in this country.”

Moss said the national total will almost certainly continue to rise as additional cases are reported. He said the resurgence should not be viewed solely through the lens of recent political debates over vaccines or public health.

The record is still far from that in 1991, when the U.S. reported more than 9,600 cases before widespread vaccination drove the disease to historically low levels.

The latest milestone underscores how the country has entered a new phase in its battle with measles, with repeated new infections of the deadly disease igniting sustained outbreaks in multiple states rather than staying concentrated in a few undervaccinated communities.

As vaccination rates decline and measles spreads wider, those outbreaks are becoming harder to extinguish, infectious-disease experts have said. There are fewer people to investigate cases, communities most affected often remain difficult to reach, and a generation of doctors is getting a crash course in diagnosing and managing a disease many have rarely — if ever — encountered. State health officials fear their outbreaks may never end and say the actual number of cases is far higher than official counts reflect.

The Hopkins data is based on information that is scraped from state and county health departments, along with other resources, which means it is ahead of reports from the CDC. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also tracks measles cases but updates its case count once a week. As of July 16, the CDC was reporting 2,260 cases.

Vaccine uptake has been declining for years, and vaccine skepticism has been on the rise. The age distribution of cases suggests the country’s vulnerability has been building for years. Only about one-fifth of reported cases have occurred in children younger than 5. Roughly half have been among people ages 5 to 19, and about 30% have been adults, which indicates that groups of people were unvaccinated across generations and not just recently amid the political spotlight on vaccine hesitancy.

Data shows more than 90% of infections occurred in people who were unvaccinated or whose status was unknown, according to the CDC.

“That tells us this has been years of undervaccination in some communities,” Moss said. “This has been years in the making. It’s not just the result of one outbreak.”