Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
Three new counties have reported measles infections linked to the West Texas outbreak, according to the Department of State Health Services (DSHS). Two of those counties are in suburban Dallas. Collin County and Rockwall County reported one case each. The third county reporting a new case, Carson County, is in the Texas Panhandle and adjacent to two other outbreak counties.
UT Health San Antonio's Dr. Jason Bowling explained that even one infectious person in a new area is a concern. "Each time you see a new case, you worry that they might go into a pocket where there's some group of unvaccinated people," Bowling explained, "and because it's so transmissible, you might see a continued bump in the numbers."
Public health experts said a community needs a measles vaccination rate of 95% to create a firewall against transmission. In Collin County, the state has reported that 93.31% of kindergartners are vaccinated against measles. That number drops to just under 92% in both Rockwall and Carson counties.
Overall, the number of new infections associated with the outbreak has slowed down over the last week. The state reported only eight new cases since the Friday update, and seven new cases in the update before that. Bowling said that's encouraging, but with outbreak-linked cases in the densely populated DFW metroplex, and particularly with more than 1,000 cases nationwide, he suspected that the measles outbreak wasn't over yet.
"You just need one of those imported cases to pop up in another area that has a lower firewall, a lower vaccine uptake rate," Bowling said. "And you could see another outbreak here in Texas."
DSHS also noted one additional hospitalization. Ninety three people have been hospitalized with measles in Texas since January.
