The United States has recorded 2,777 confirmed measles cases so far in 2026, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published this week — the country's largest annual caseload since 1991 and already well above the 2,289 cases reported for all of 2025.
The tally, current through Aug. 20, spans 47 states and jurisdictions, with 94 percent of cases tied to 36 active outbreaks, according to CIDRAP, the University of Minnesota's infectious disease tracking service. Utah has recorded the longest-running and largest outbreak of the year, with more than 500 cases, while Pennsylvania has logged 226 cases, including 57 added in a single week.
Roughly 93 percent of this year's patients were unvaccinated or had unknown vaccination status, and about two-thirds of cases have occurred in people 19 or younger, according to CDC surveillance data. Health officials say sustained chains of local transmission, rather than isolated travel-linked cases, are now driving the outbreak.
A Status Two Decades in the Making
The United States was declared to have eliminated measles in 2000, meaning the disease no longer circulated continuously within the country's borders. That status is reviewed periodically by a regional health commission, which is expected to determine later this year whether the U.S. has kept the designation after the country recorded measles cases every week since January 2025 — a streak of continuous transmission that itself threatens to undercut the elimination criteria, regardless of the final case count for the year.
Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff, whose state is battling its third outbreak of the year, called the disease "preventable" in comments reported by CIDRAP, echoing public health officials elsewhere who have urged renewed attention to routine childhood vaccination as the primary defense. The CDC recommends two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, which together are about 97 percent effective at preventing infection.
Losing elimination status would not change CDC clinical guidance, but researchers say it would carry real weight — a marker that a disease once considered a relic of the pre-vaccine era in the United States has reestablished a lasting foothold.
