US on track to lose measles elimination status as outbreaks cost $83M

The U.S. is expected to lose its official measles elimination status after the Pan American Health Organization reviews the situation this week. More than 5,100 cases have been reported nationwide in 2026 as of early November, the country's worst outbreak in more than three decades. States have confirmed eight deaths tied to the disease this year: six in Pennsylvania, one in New York and one in Wisconsin.

A new tool built by researchers at Johns Hopkins University puts the economic cost of this year's outbreaks at nearly $83 million. That figure breaks down into $56 million in public health response costs, almost $25 million in lost productivity and more than $1.8 million in direct medical expenses. The same tool estimates that 2025's outbreaks, which involved 2,289 confirmed cases nationwide, ran more than $37 million.

Bryan Patenaude, a health economist at the International Vaccine Access Center at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who helped develop the tool, pointed to adults who skipped vaccination because they grew up behind herd immunity. They now face serious illness and steep hospital bills, he said. The tool is not a definitive accounting, but it uses fresher state-specific cost and financing data than the researchers' initial August study, which relied on historical outbreak costs and found a historical average of nearly $59,000 per case just for public health response. That model estimated roughly $298,000 in fixed costs plus about $16,300 for each additional case.

Costs swing widely by state. New York's 48 cases in 2025 carried an estimated $1.1 million in costs, including nearly $749,000 in public health responses, $333,000 in productivity losses and roughly $24,500 in direct medical expenses. Texas, the epicenter of 2025's largest outbreak with 803 cases, saw nearly $13 million in costs: $9 million in public health, $4 million in productivity losses and around $288,000 in direct medical expenses.

Joey Mattingly, a pharmacist and health economist at the University of Utah, modeled a hypothetical 1,500-case outbreak in a 2025 study and landed on about $90 million, roughly $26 million of it in productivity losses. He estimated each quarantined person costs about $300 in lost productivity alone, so a single case exposing 40 to 50 people could mean $12,000 to $15,000 in losses even if none of them get sick. Mattingly said the burden lands hardest on local health departments, which are already stretched thin on other work.