Pennsylvania reports that a 40-year-old woman has died from measles, which was declared eliminated in the US in 2000.
Published On 13 Sep 2026
A 40-year-old woman in the state of Pennsylvania has died of measles, becoming the third person to die from a rare outbreak of the preventable disease in the United States.
“This is a heartbreaking loss for the family and an unfortunate reminder that measles can be a serious and potentially life-threatening disease,” Greg Furlong, the medical examiner for Jefferson County, about 230km (143 miles) northwest of Philadelphia, said in a statement posted online on Sunday.
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Health officials did not identify the woman, but said she died of complications associated with measles on Saturday.
County officials warned residents that measles is a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease, and urged them to “take appropriate steps to protect themselves and their families”.
The Washington Post, citing Furlong, reported that the woman was unvaccinated.
The state of Pennsylvania has also been the site of the other two measles-related deaths to occur this year in the US, reported by authorities to have happened in August. Both were in Lancaster County, a largely rural, agriculture-dependent area home to a large Amish population, a conservative Christian population which has lower vaccination rates than other groups in the US. Those two deaths also involved unvaccinated people, according to state health authorities.
There have been 3,294 cases of measles in the US so far in 2026, according to the Centers for Disease Control, across more than 45 states.
In 2025, there were 2,289 cases in the country and three deaths, according to the agency.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the state has recorded 676 total cases of measles so far this year, with 108 new cases being reported in the last week. Some 124 of these cases involved people having to be hospitalised. Nearly a third were children. Less than 1 percent of all cases in the state were people who were fully vaccinated. Lancaster County, according to the state agency, has accounted for 295 of all cases in Pennsylvania in 2026.
Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, but has made a comeback in recent years, which some experts have linked to a rise in vaccine scepticism.
In recent months, President Donald Trump’s administration has openly clashed with local health authorities, including in Pennsylvania, disputing the state’s characterisation of the deaths earlier this year as being measles-related, and removing them from its national accounting of how the measles outbreak is progressing.
In August, after the state announced the first two measles deaths, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy Jr, a well-known vaccine sceptic, accused Pennsylvania’s Democrat-led government of “weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain” in a post on X, and raised the possibility the announcement “may even have been altogether fabricated”.
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, in turn, has accused Kennedy of spreading conspiracy theories and pointed out that he spoke at an event in Lancaster County several years ago, “downplaying the severity of measles and saying that the cure was ‘chicken soup and vitamin A’”.
