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State health officials reported the first measles case in Ohio this year. The Ohio Department of Health said the person infected was an adult in Ashtabula County who was unvaccinated and had contact with someone who had recently traveled outside the country. (3/20)

Two Prince George’s County residents who recently traveled together internationally have been confirmed to have measles, the Maryland Department of Health said Thursday. The positive cases are not related to the confirmed measles infection of a Howard County resident that was announced earlier this month, health officials said. The infections also are not associated with the growing measles outbreak that has struck parts of the southwestern United States, including New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. (Deal-Zimmerman, 3/20)

While Chicago so far has been spared from a surge in measles cases in the U.S. this year, public health officials nonetheless are urging people to make sure they've been vaccinated against the highly contagious disease. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there have been 301 confirmed cases of measles nationwide as of March 13, with about 90% of those cases from an outbreak in Texas and neighboring New Mexico. (Feurer, 3/20)

With its measles outbreak spreading to two additional states, Texas is on track to becoming the cause of a national epidemic if it doesn’t start vaccinating more people, according to public health experts. (Simpson, 3/21)

In February, a 6-year-old Texan was the first child in the United States to die of measles in two decades. Her death might have been a warning to an increasingly vaccine-hesitant country about the consequences of shunning the only guaranteed way to fight the preventable disease. Instead, the anti-vaccine movement is broadcasting a different lesson, turning the girl and her family into propaganda, an emotional plank in the misguided argument that vaccines are more dangerous than the illnesses they prevent. (Zadrozny, 3/20)

Former U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned that vaccine skepticism has eroded the importance of herd immunity in light of the measles outbreak in Texas, and put some of the blame on Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In an op-ed published by CNN on Thursday, Adams wrote that the high rate of vaccine decline in the Texas Mennonite community where the measles outbreak began highlights how quickly measles can spread through an unvaccinated population. (Choi, 3/20)

For decades, Bill Nye the Science Guy has imparted a simple message to generations of kids and adults: “Science rules!” The catchphrase took on a new meaning Thursday, as Nye critiqued Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his views and decisions on science and vaccines. “We really try in planetary science to stay away from the politics,” he said. “But man, it’s really hard right now — this is so extreme.” (Broderick, 3/21)

Since taking the helm of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has both backed vaccination as a public health tool and made remarks that threaten to undermine it. (Johnson and Smith-Schoenwalder, 3/20)