At the turn of the twenty-first century, measles, a highly contagious respiratory illness, was declared eliminated from the United States, thanks to herd immunity achieved through a critical mass of vaccination. Yet at the beginning of this year, Katherine Wells, the public health director for the city and county of Lubbock, found herself in the midst of a measles resurgence. The disease, which most commonly affects children, found its way into a Mennonite community in nearby Gaines County, where vaccination rates for measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) hover at around 82 percent, well below the national average of 93 percent. Two children from there died of the disease, in February and April. It wasn’t just the deaths that shook Wells, who has two young daughters. “Putting a child on a ventilator or having them be in the hospital for multiple days because of dehydration or they can’t breathe—it’s tough on those little bodies,” she said. Texas Monthly spoke with Wells by phone in April, when Lubbock was still at the heart of an outbreak in Texas that had sent more than sixty people to the hospital, then once again in May, when the reported number had exceeded eighty.
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