25 cases of measles identified in central, southeastern Minnesota, MDH says
By Aki Nace, Conor Wight
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TODD COUNTY, Minnesota (WCCO) — The Minnesota Department of Health says it has identified two separate measles outbreaks in southeastern and central Minnesota, leaded to 25 cases in the last month.
The clusters in Fillmore and Todd counties in recent weeks make up more than half of the measles cases in Minnesota this year. According to the state’s department of health, all the people who got sick were unvaccinated.
Beth Parilla, who manages the Vaccine Preventable Diseases Section with the Minnesota Department of Health, said that the clusters in Fillmore and Todd counties are unrelated to one another but began in similar ways. She said that in each county, they began with someone picking up measles while travelling elsewhere in the United States and bringing the disease back to communities with low vaccination rates.
“The more people that get measles, the more likely we are to see people with severe complications,” Parilla said, “with a disease like this, we will do our best, but it is really hard to contain measles.”
Jackie Och, the Health and Human Services Director in Todd County, said that her team is concerned about declining MMR vaccine rates in children. As of 2021, the county reported a vaccine rate amongst children born that year of 74.6%; that rate dropped to 61.6% by 2023.
Parilla said that given how contagious measles are, vaccination rates need to be near 100 percent to prevent spread.
“It spreads really really fast. and we have a lot of groups in Minnesota that now have concerningly low immunization coverage,” Parilla said.
Linda Widmer said that she wishes she had the vaccine available to her when she was a young child. Widmer said that she was vacationing at a Minnesota lake at the age of seven when she found herself fighting an incredibly high fever for up to five days thanks to a measles infection. She believes the prolonged fever impacted her brain long-term.
“I felt terrible and just stayed in bed,” Widmer said, “I was miserable and I couldn’t go out and play. It was terrible.”
This was 1955; the vaccine became available to the public in 1963. By the year 2000, the United States declared the disease eradicated within the country. Among the more than 4,000 cases recorded in 2026 in the United States, Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services has confirmed at least 267 cases.
Measles, which was eliminated in the U.S. for decades, is classified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as one of the most contagious infectious diseases. The best way to prevent the disease is through vaccination, the department of health says.
“There are pockets of unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people across Minnesota, and anyone who isn’t vaccinated against measles is at risk, especially right now,” the health department said in a statement.
Overall, the U.S. has seen 4,000 cases of measles this year. Forty-two of those cases have happened in Minnesota. Last year, Minnesota saw 26 total cases.
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