More than 130 unvaccinated students at two South Carolina schools are being quarantined after being exposed to measles, amid an ongoing outbreak in the state — a sign, public health experts warn, that cases could continue to rise this school year.
On Tuesday, the South Carolina Department of Public Health confirmed the 16th case of measles in the state so far this year. Last week, public health officials said in a press briefing that more than 100 unvaccinated students at Global Academy and Fairforest Elementary School had been exposed to measles and would be excluded from school for 21 days, at which point the period of potential disease transmission ended.
Of the 16 cases in the state, five are people who were exposed in a school setting and have been quarantined at home in recent days, according to South Carolina health officials.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, says the fact that South Carolina students were exposed to measles shows why people should be concerned about rising cases as children return to the classroom.
“We have a growing population of susceptible children whose parents have chosen not to vaccinate them,” says Offit. “This is the most contagious human infection, and it is not surprising that as children return to school and we enter the winter and early spring months, this virus will resurface.”
The outbreak in South Carolina comes amid a surge in measles cases across the country. This summer, measles cases in the United States reached a 33-year high, leading public health experts to warn that other diseases could see a similar resurgence. Minnesota is also in the middle of an outbreak; as of last week, there were 20 confirmed or probable cases in the state so far this year.
Public health officials have emphasized that the best way to protect against measles is to get vaccinated with the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which is usually given during childhood in two doses. Experts said the success of the vaccination program was largely the reason measles was declared eliminated from the country more than two decades ago. But vaccination rates have fallen in recent years and measles cases have soared.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), when more than 95% of residents in a community are vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella, “most people are protected by community immunity.” But CDC data shows that only 92.7% of kindergartners were vaccinated during the 2023-2024 school year. That figure has dropped to about 90% in some areas of South Carolina, according to state public health officials.
Learn more: Do you need a measles vaccine booster?
Last week, the CDC confirmed 1,563 cases of measles this year. Many of those cases stem from an outbreak in Texas that began in late January, which sickened more than 700 people and killed two unvaccinated children in Texas and an unvaccinated adult in New Mexico.
In August, Texas health officials declared the outbreak over, but they cautioned that the threat posed by the disease was not. At the time, Offit said that although the outbreak in Texas had subsided, he feared the number of cases could rise again in a few months.
Offit also expresses concern that the number of national cases confirmed by the CDC is an underestimate. He criticizes Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic who has made a number of changes to the nation’s immunization policy, for undermining the ability of health agencies to track and monitor the disease.
“Not only do I think it’s getting worse, I think we won’t know because the surveillance capacity has been diminished so much by our Secretary of Health and Human Services,” Offit says.
