This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.
By Kristen Hwang, CalMatters
When a possible measles case is identified in California, a phone rings at the local health department and the clock starts ticking.
Laboratory workers need to process samples as soon as possible to confirm the case. And a public health nurse must call the patient to find out where they’ve been and who they’ve been in contact with recently.
If test results are positive, the communicable disease team has 72 hours or less to identify anyone who has been exposed and may be at high risk of infection or serious illness. Those people must quarantine or take a dose of a post-exposure prophylaxis to prevent spread. For the next 21 days nurses will monitor the group for symptoms.
Measles is the most contagious vaccine-preventable viral infection in the world, and California is fighting multiple outbreaks. In a room where one person is infected, nine out of 10 unvaccinated people will also contract the disease. The viral particles also linger in the air long after the contagious person leaves, risking exposure to those who enter the room up to two hours later.
“That’s ridiculously infectious,” said Dr. Sharon Balter, director of acute communicable disease control with Los Angeles County public health. “It balloons very quickly, and because measles spreads very fast we have to get on it right away. We can’t say we’ll wait until tomorrow.”
California has a high enough vaccination rate — about 95% of kindergarteners — to provide herd immunity against measles, but throughout the state pockets of unvaccinated communities drive outbreaks, experts say.
Shasta and Riverside counties are working to contain localized outbreaks. These are the first measles outbreaks in the state since 2020 and are happening at a time when health departments have less money and fewer staff than in recent years. In total, seven counties have reported a total of 21 measles cases this year, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Throughout the country, 26 states have reported measles cases since the start of the year, including a massive outbreak in South Carolina where officials identified nearly 1,000 cases, mostly among unvaccinated children. It is the largest outbreak since theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention declared measles eradicated more than 25 years ago.
“The United States is experiencing the highest numbers of measles cases, outbreaks, hospitalizations and deaths in more than 30 years, driven by populations with low vaccination rates,” said California Public Health Officer Dr. Erica Pan in a statement earlier this month. “We all need to work together to share the medical evidence, benefits, and safety of vaccines to provide families the information they need to protect children and our communities.”
Containment comes with high costs
Investigating any communicable disease is time-intensive and expensive. The first three measles cases reported in L.A. County this year cost an estimated $231,000, according to a health department analysis.
Why does it cost so much? Because a disease investigation often requires a legion of public health nurses, physicians, epidemiologists and laboratory scientists to follow-up with hundreds of contacts, Balter said.
That includes sometimes visiting homes or exposure sites. For example, a recent exposure at a daycare required nurses to wring urine out of used diapers to test babies for measles. County health workers monitored 246 people who had been exposed to those first three measles cases — and the work is ongoing.
On Feb. 19, the county reported its fourth measles case. All of them were related to international travel. Other cases in California also have primarily been related to travel either internationally or to states where there are outbreaks. An unvaccinated child in Napa County contracted measles in January after traveling to South Carolina.
Riverside County health officials reported one measles case where the child had not traveled recently, and Shasta County health officials suspect their first case could be related to travel in Southern California but are waiting for DNA testing for confirmation.
Orange County reported two travel-related cases this year.
Health departments have fewer resources, more cases
Local health departments rely heavily on federal funding to prevent the spread of infectious diseases, but last year, the Trump administration slashed nearly $1 billion of public health funding from California. This year it attempted to claw back another $600 million from California and three other Democratic states.
Pending lawsuits froze the cuts, but local health departments are treating the money as a lost cause because they cannot bear the financial risk if a judge eventually rules in favor of the Trump administration.
Consequently, health departments closed clinics, terminated programs and laid off dozens of workers.
“What we can do with less is less unfortunately,” Balter said. L.A. county is facing a $50 million shortfall due to federal, state and local cuts and recently closed seven public health clinics.
Health departments are also confronting decreased public confidence: The high-profile questioning of vaccine safety and effectiveness by U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has complicated public health’s struggle to contain the spread of preventable infections.
California Democratic leaders are aggressively fighting Kennedy’s direction. They sued to block the administration’s new vaccine guidelines, which stripped universal recommendation from seven childhood vaccines. They blame Kennedy and the Trump administration for “dismantling” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and stoking fears over debunked claims that vaccines cause autism.
The state also released its own vaccine guidelines and formed an alliance among four western states to share public health information and recommendations.
“Everything including the outbreaks, the financial cuts, the questions from the federal government that are arising are making our work very difficult,” said Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong, Orange County public health officer.
Twelve years ago, Orange County was the site of California’s largest measles outbreak in decades. An exposure at Disneyland from an unknown source infected 131 Californians and spread to six states, Canada and Mexico.
The outbreak, which lasted four months, spurred state lawmakers to pass some of the strictest childhood vaccine requirements in the country.
But even a single measles case requires “vast amounts of infrastructure” to contain, Chinsio-Kwong said. On average, the department identifies and monitors 100 exposed people per case. Since the start of last year, Orange County has lost $22 million in federal cuts to public health. The department is trying to protect their communicable disease surveillance work, but it gets harder with every cut.
“We’re trying to prioritize our communicable disease control division,” health officer Chinsio-Kwong said. “There are a lot of different federal cuts, but we’re putting that as front and center: That has to be saved no matter what.”
Measles spread in unvaccinated groups
Six hundred miles north, Shasta County is grappling with its first measles cases since 2019 and the state’s largest outbreak of the year.
In late January, a sick child visited a health clinic in Redding with measles symptoms that laboratory testing later confirmed. Health officials interviewed 278 people and identified six locations where others were exposed: a restaurant, a church basketball game, a gym, a park, Costco and the clinic.
They also identified seven other cases among family members or neighbors who were in close contact with the child.
It can take 21 days from the time of exposure for measles symptoms to develop. On Feb. 19, just before the end of that period, health officials confirmed a ninth case.
That person didn’t recognize the symptoms and visited several places while contagious, including a school, a church service, a basketball game and a clinic, said Daniel Walker, a Shasta County supervising epidemiologist. Now, the contract tracing process has started over. The communicable disease team expects to interview even more people this time.
All cases have been among children who were unvaccinated or did not know their vaccination status.
“It’s a great time to get immunized, because you can’t know when you’re next going to be exposed…especially because we’re in an outbreak situation,” Walker said.
Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.
This is why misinformation is so dangerous. How thousands of people died needlessly from Covid? Now you have kids at risk due to gullible and ignorant parents who listen to podcasters and people in the current administration who have ZERO qualifications. Ignorance KILLS. I really think a more concerted and national effort must be undertaken to stop the constant stream of verifiable lies and unqualified nonsense being spread from our government to our gullible masses. I can’t do it all on my own, folks!
My children are vaccinated from every childhood disease. They have even had flu shots this year. They are not vaccinated from Covid because it’s not a childhood disease and they are at nearly zero risk. When you mislead the world about the risks of a disease, cripple a generation with lockdowns, ineffective masking and school closures, this skepticism is the result.
mislead? covid killed more people under trump than he or you would admit. so denying help, yeah that did wonders for the 200k+ people that succumbed to the illness in the US alone. I personally contracted it before i was vaxed, it took me down for two weeks hard. Worst sickness i’ve had. Got it once after being vaxed, no symptoms other than just being VERY tired and that was just 3 days. So yeah, it works. Do i go get updates? Nope.
SMURFO – explain how people were misled about the risks of Covid, a novel (that means new as in never before seen by science) and deadly pandemic that killed millions.
You choosing to risk your children is YOUR choice, don’t blame the government for your hate-driven ignorance. I say hate-driven because you know damn well if Trump or RFK Jr. told you to vax your kids you would have.
thank you, Sac, i wanted to post something about this, but you just said it all. Ignorance Kills. And their ignorance can kill others.
More lethal fallout from science deniers.
Big difference between measles, mumps, rubella shot (MMR) for kids and an indefinite series of COVID shots for that same demographic. Apples to oranges. No comparison whatsoever. MMR is a long-standing proven vaccination for kids for a deadly and highly-contagious virus. It’s worked well for many decades. Unfortunately, the pharma and federal push to jab little kids and everyone else a couple times a year with the latest COVID shot has backfired. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. Some people lost faith in the government’s judgement on vaccination recommendations as as a whole. So no, this a lethal fallout from poor judgement on the part of some politicians, the FDA, and big pharma during COVID.
BASIC – No one is making a comparison between measles and Covid vaccines.
I am. That’s the point you didn’t get. They’re related.
BASIC – uh…. did you slip and fall and accidentally drink a can of paint?
“Apples to oranges. No comparison whatsoever.” YOUR. WORDS.
I’ll spell it out for you, the kid in the back of the classroom who still thinks he’s the smartest in the school.
COVID vaccinations have been incredibly (you’d say “wildly” because you love that word) overplayed. Basic, long standing vaccination rates such as MMR have therefore suffered because folks are starting to be skeptical about vaccines, for right or wrong. Hence the boy who cried wolf analogy.
BASIC – keep moving those goalposts, Simon.
BASIC your brain isn’t working again squirrely. You voted for Trump and MAHA. Anyone supporting this anti-vax nonsense, such as yourself, are the real sickos. Typical cynical lies – typical of smarmy conservative beta males.
On April 9, 2025, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. falsely stated that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine has not been “safety tested.” Kennedy also described the MMR vaccine as offering only short-term protection against measles, saying, “We’re always going to have measles, no matter what happens, as the vaccine wanes very quickly.”
BASIC – it’s funny you mention that. I did sit in the back of my lectures a lot during college at graduated with High Honors at UCSB. So yeah, I often was one of the smartest in the class.
You say they’re not comparable, “whatsoever,” and now say you are comparing them. Do you see how poorly informed that sounds?
Now, as for your blaming the government for people’s stupidity during the vaccine years (Biden), you’re way off. The people who got the covid vax and get the boosters are still the people giving their kids MMR. No one is abandoning proven childhood vaccines because they still got covid (but didn’t die) after they got the covid vax. Only the morons who believe what people like you say continue to do that.
Blame the liars and the idiots. They’re the ones killing people.
I can see what basic is trying to relay, in short, people began losing faith during covid because of botched vaccines and ramped up schedules which would make a lot of communities leery. Those people lost faith and are now questioning other vaccines which is bad, we get it, but it’s happening because of that. Now to tie that in with what Sac was saying ignorance kills. Some fools deny fact and science and medical research because someone on a podcast or RFK said otherwise. Neither party should be taken literally. It doesn’t change that those deniers and anti vaxers are putting themselves, their families and their communities at large, at risk.
Pretty straightforward, isn’t it? And like I said, “for right or wrong”. If parents choose to not vaccinate their kids for measles, well…I think that’s a bad choice. And a few will regret that. Then again, I’m a physician. I doubt too many physicians don’t vaccinate their kids with MMR.
You supported RFK, right?
No reference to MMR vaccines in this article, so that’s a red herring, Basic.
It sounds like you’re trying to justify and shift the blame for people’s own stupidity. The COVID crisis was about a basically new disease that mutated many times over a short time period. Scientists were racing to stay ahead of those mutations. So the only thing “indefinite” about that was if/when they would figure it out and catch up. If anyone interpreted those efforts as some kind of big government scam that’s on them, and the greedy snake-oil charlatans pushing their own “remedies” like Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquiine, or whatever the hell DJT was pushing. It wasn’t pharma’s fault, or Fauci’s fault. The misinformation came the Trump admin and the online influencers, and Trump voters were uneducated and gullible enough to swallow it.
That should sound familiar because it’s happening again, but exponentially worse, and I am using the mathematical definition of “exponentially”. Once again the Trump administration is directly responsible for spreading lies about science and health, now in the form of that dessicated leather fanny bag RFK jr. His statements have been shown over and over again to be abominably stupid, and people with the true “trump derangement syndrome” have made everything a political litmus test, including the willingness to harm one’s family and community by remaining unvaccinated and “MAHA” – loyal.
No BasicInfo, you can’t blame this on COVID or “big pharma”. People are going to die from a preventable disease simply because they trusted Donald Jackass Trump.
And because they trusted medical advice from quacks like this guy.
100% !
Oh BASIC – you talk like you are so tuff. But, YOU gave in to the evil of Big Pharma pediatric evil and jabbed your own child. Keep being the beta male conservative though….
In June 2022 you wrote: “We vaccinated our 9 y.o.,…..”
https://www.edhat.com/news/covid-19-vaccination-soon-available-for-children-under-five-years-of-age/
As I recall, Edhat was deleting any comments openly discussing vaccines during the lockdowns, so I partly blame Edhat’s censorship for the general lack of public trust surrounding vaccinations, at least in this community.
Maybe it’s also the reason this forum has become an echo chamber of ignorance and raging TDS.
You recall incorrectly–rather, you simply fabricated that. And no one with an IQ above room temperature uses TDS as a pejorative unless they mean Trump Devotion Syndrome.
Dismissed.
OLDE MANN – you recall wrong. The site was, and rightfully so, deleting comments that included verifiably false information about the virus and the vaccine, much like most social media did. This was for the purpose of stemming the spread of deadly misinformation. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of people died due to misinformation from right wing media which then trickled down to ignorant science deniers, much like you. You’re lucky you made it through. Not everyone did.
To blame a local news site for the “general lack of public trust” is to ignore the reality that most of the educated public dismissed you, BASIC and other peddlers of unfounded claims and abject lies about the vaccine and the virus in general. The only ones who still don’t trust vaccines, actual doctors and all science in general are the same ones who thought horse dewormer recommended by YouTubers and podcasters with no medical expertise was a superior remedy to a proven to be effective vaccine.
As Marcel says, saying TDS is really one of the dumbest thing an adult can say these days. Not surprised you said it.
Your comments truly paint a picture of someone that should stay in their basement in IV and let the rest of the educated masses live without the incessant noise of nonsense.
Oh gosh – low information post from the guy who moved to IV and complains about the noise and partying. How am I not surprised. The post is remarkably similar to so many posted by beta conservative males.
That echo you hear is the sound of you and a bunch of other Trumpie cult members crying about literally everything. Touch grass.
Concentrated in the red areas, of course.
concentrated in agricultural areas?
SAIL – ag areas are red areas for the most part. Poorly educated.
“The poorly educated” might be too vague and place blame on public schools. In no way is it ever a public school. It is always parents, grandparents, friends and online addiction to stupid that are at fault. When being stupid in your community and family circles is sacrosanct then science and objective reality really are the enemy – the others. Who knows, it might even be genetic somehow. There is no fixing stupid unfortunately. Someone used the word “deplorable” to describe them once, which I think is more apropos. In fact, that’s a very kind adjective to describe them. I might actually choose to use the phrase “Stupid Dummies”, which is actually closer to the clinical symptoms.
Thanks to RFK and the idiotic MAHA movement, measles is now back and killing children.