As Measles Spreads, Some Doctors See the Virus for the First Time

Until this year, Dr. Leila Myrick had never seen a case of measles.

She doesn’t remember professors in medical school talking about the virus. When she saw photos of the characteristic red rash on practice board exams, she flipped back through her textbooks to figure out what it was.

“Most practicing doctors, in today’s day and age, are not going to see it in real life,” she said.

But in the past few months, Dr. Myrick, a family medicine doctor in Seminole, Texas, has treated about 20 people with measles. She is likely to see more cases, as a raging outbreak that has infected 481 people in Texas and killed one child continues to spread. In Texas, New Mexico and other parts of the country where cases have emerged, health care workers like Dr. Myrick are confronting the highly contagious virus for the first time. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 607 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year — more than double the number of cases seen in all of 2024.

“The generation of physicians who are currently, for the most part, treating patients haven’t actually seen what a measles case looks like other than from a textbook or a video,” said Dr. Andy Lubell, chief medical officer of True North Pediatrics in Pennsylvania, where a physician diagnosed the practice’s first ever measles case this March.

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000. Cases still pop up around the country each year, sometimes seeding larger outbreaks. But public health experts worry that this year, measles could become more common in more places. The virus is spreading rapidly in some parts of the country, and vaccination rates nationwide have been falling for years.

“I remember learning about measles, German measles, all these things,” said Dr. Seth Coombs, a doctor at the Lovington Medical Clinic in New Mexico who saw his first measles case this year. “But you just don’t see them. And so like anything, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

Measles can sometimes be hard to recognize at first, especially if a doctor doesn’t think to look for it. The infection causes a telltale red rash, but it can take days to appear. Before that, someone with measles might have only a fever, cough, a runny nose and red, watery eyes — symptoms that mimic the signs of many other viral infections.

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