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Measles costs are accumulating as funding cuts threaten the outbreak response

By CNN Newsource

Published April 17, 2025 6:00 am

By Neha Mukherjee, CNN

(CNN) — Measles cases have surpassed 650 in an ongoing multistate outbreak, but federal funding cuts could threaten the response.

“I think that we are scraping to find the resources and personnel needed to provide support to Texas and other jurisdictions,” Dr. David Sugerman, a senior scientist at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday at a meeting of the agency’s vaccine advisers.

Texas – the epicenter of the outbreak – has sent several requests to the CDC for resources, Sugerman said, as response costs grow.

The CDC recently pulled back billions of dollars in Covid-19 pandemic-era grants that state and local health officials said were also being used to respond to other public health threats, like the measles outbreak. The US Department of Health and Human Services also announced sweeping layoffs two weeks ago, including an estimated 2,400 employees from the CDC.

In light of these cuts, Dallas County, Texas, says it has had to cancel over 50 immunization clinics. In New Mexico – where at least 63 measles cases have been reported – some staff that was responsible for order vaccines and checking vaccination records had to be let go.

The outbreak is spreading within Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma, and Sugerman said the same genotyping sequence of the virus has been found in cases in Kansas and across international borders in Ontario, Canada, and Chihuahua, Mexico.

Texas is mobilizing its resources and moving staff from other areas and domains into the measles response area, Sugerman said.

But local officials say resource limitations are taking a toll on public health workers and the health system.

“We still have to be able to do all of our other public health work, so it does become a strain on the system,” said Katherine Wells, director of Lubbock Public Health. “Public health doesn’t have … a lot of duplication of staff, so … you’re asking a lot of staff to do additional work beyond their regular daily jobs. It just gets draining.”

Experts say that the effects of these funding cuts will be felt beyond the measles outbreak.

“Other types of care are going to be influenced by having to redirect these resources to the setting,” said Dr. Bryan Patenaude, an associate professor of health economics at Johns Hopkins University. “In situations of scarcity where you have limited funding available for health overall, that’s going to place more and more pressure on those other disease areas that really have nothing to do with measles.”

Costs for each measles case

History has showed that the costs associated with an outbreak can accumulate in a short amount of time.

“Each measles case can be $30,000 to $50,000 for public health response work, and that adds up quite quickly,” Sugerman said Tuesday.

This includes testing, laboratory work, contact tracing, vaccination efforts and health-care costs, according to Dr. Catherine Troisi, an infectious disease epidemiologist with UTHealth Houston.

Hospitalizations can also become quite expensive, she said. The outbreak has put 63 people in the hospital across Texas and New Mexico, with another hospitalization in Kansas.

The cost is “going to depend on how severely ill the person is … how much treatment they need [and] how long they’re in the hospital,” Troisi said. Given the contagious nature of the airborne disease, measles cases in hospitals also require proper ventilation and isolation procedures, which add to costs.

In addition to health-care and public health response, experts say there are a vast amount of indirect costs during an outbreak. For example, parents may need to take time off work to care for sick children, or there could be costs associated with transportation to and from facilities, Patenaude said.

Measles can cause a variety of complications including ear infections, pneumonia, encephalitis or death. It is especially dangerous for young and unvaccinated children.

There have been several hospitalized cases of pneumonia and at least one case of neurological symptoms from measles during this outbreak, according to Covenant Hospital in Lubbock.

“The more sick kids we see, it also increases the likelihood of seeing an additional death,” Wells said.

There have been three deaths reported in this outbreak: two school-age children in Texas and one adult in New Mexico whose death is under investigation. They were all unvaccinated.