An 8-year-old girl in Texas died Thursday morning of “measles pulmonary failure,” according to The New York Times, citing records it obtained.
A Trump administration official told the paper the girl’s cause of death is “still being looked at.”
This is the second death in the state linked to the ongoing measles outbreak. The first death was in an unvaccinated school-age child in February. A death in New Mexico remains under investigation.
The outbreak – now spanning Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and possibly Kansas – reached at least 569 cases Friday, according to data obtained from state health departments.
Texas has reported 481 outbreak-associated cases; New Mexico has 54 cases, and Oklahoma reported 10 cases – eight confirmed and two probable – as of Friday.
Cases in Kansas, which the state health department said may be linked to the outbreak, reached 24 as of Wednesday.
Experts said these numbers are most likely a severe undercount because many cases go unreported.
Most of the reported cases are in people under 18, and experts worry about increasing hospitalizations, especially in younger children who are at higher risk of complications.
“The more children who get the disease means that there’s an increased chance that there will be more children getting sicker with complications from measles,” said Dr. Christina Johns, a pediatric emergency physician at PM Pediatrics in Annapolis, Maryland.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has downplayed the severity of the outbreak and faced criticism of the agency’s response.
