“Two people have died” from measles, US Health Minister Robert Kennedy Junior said today on the sidelines of the cabinet meeting, referring to the epidemic of this extremely contagious disease in Texas.

Earlier, Texas health authorities had announced the first death of measles for a decade in the US, stating that it was “an unobtrusive child, school age” who had been hospitalized in the city of Lambok.

Since the beginning of the year, more than 120 cases of measles have been recorded in Texas and about 10 in the neighboring state of New Mexico, raising fears of returning this particularly infectious disease that had been almost eliminated in the US thanks to vaccination.

The exacerbation of measles outbreaks is recorded as US vaccination rates decrease after the Covid-19 pandemic and experts warn that the trend may worsen after Robert Kennedy Junior’s taking up the Ministry of Health and the safety of the health.

Infectious Disease Aimes Antalja of Johns Hopkins university points out that although measles outbreaks had not caused deaths in the US in previous years, “it was a matter of time for that to happen”. “It reminds us that there is a reason why the vaccine was developed,” he told the French News Agency (AFP).

Prior to the creation of a measles vaccine in the early 1960s, the US recorded 3 to 4 million cases per year and 400-500 deaths. Viral disease still causes tens of thousands of deaths a year around the world.