The situation in the last month
According to Patrick Gavigan, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Penn State Health Golisano Children's Hospital, the facility where he works has treated around twenty patients with measles this year, mostly in the last month. The hospital is located near Lancaster County, where more than a third of the state's cases have been confirmed. Based on what has been reported, what is particularly worrying would be the severity of the disease recorded even in people who were healthy. Among other things, in addition to breathing difficulties, several patients developed hepatitis or encephalitis. And while some have been discharged, others are facing slower recoveries.
The unvaccinated
The widespread fear, as mentioned, is that many infections are not even recorded. "For every hospitalized pediatric patient, we talk to the family and find that all or almost all of them at home have had a measles-like illness," Gavigan said. And failure to identify cases complicates contact tracing. Among other things, as confirmed by the expert, all the patients hospitalized for measles in his hospital had not been vaccinated. Statewide, less than 1% of cases are in vaccinated people.
The demand for vaccines is increasing
Precisely given the situation, the demand for vaccinations is increasing. According to the Pennsylvania Health Department, more than 49,000 doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine were administered in August, nearly double the rate of any month. In the first three weeks of September there were over 38 thousand doses, also through temporary vaccination centers in the communities affected by the infections. “For a long time people hadn't seen any cases of measles,” Gavigan notes. Now some citizens "who were previously hesitant are getting vaccinated after seeing their family members get sick and are encouraging others to do the same", he said.
The situation in New York state
Just recently, meanwhile, the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, declared a state of emergency due to the epidemic. His is the first act of this kind by a state since cases began to increase in 2025, as "Nbc News" reports. “No one should get seriously ill or die from a vaccine-preventable disease,” Hochul said in a statement. Among the measures adopted by the state was also the expansion of the number of health professionals authorized to administer measles, mumps and rubella vaccines. According to the executive order, 108 cases of measles have been reported in the state this year, with most concentrated in the period from July 15 onwards and in rural communities with low vaccination rates.
Pregliasco's comment
"The lesson from New York - commented the virologist Fabrizio Pregliasco - is simple" and "the decision of the State of New York to declare an emergency for measles must also make us reflect in Europe and Italy". Measles, explained the director of the School of Specialization in Hygiene and Preventive Medicine at the University of Milan, "is not a banal exanthematous disease of childhood: it is one of the most contagious infections we know and, when it finds pockets of the population that are not adequately immunised, it can start circulating again with impressive speed. The US numbers are eloquent: in the first nine months of 2026, many more cases were reported than the 2,289 recorded in the whole of 2025. And the 95% are linked to outbreaks. We are therefore not faced with sporadic episodes, but with the concrete demonstration of what happens when communities are created in which vaccination coverage is not sufficient. On 24 August the health authorities reported 29 cases, with a particular concentration in rural areas of the state".
