In the United States the measles alarm is growing: over 1,500 cases and outbreaks on the rise. Bassetti: “America has gone back 50 years”
The nightmare has returned to the United States measleswith numbers that had not been recorded for twenty-five years. From the beginning of 2025 i confirmed cases are 1,563according to official data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but experts believe the real number is much higher. This is the worst figure since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000.
The most worrying increase concerns the last few weeks: 27 new infections per week since late August, with outbreaks stretching from Utah to Minnesota to South Carolina.
Schools in quarantine
The emergency particularly concerns schools, where the presence of a high number of unvaccinated children is fueling the spread of the virus. In Minnesotain the Minneapolis area, 118 students they were quarantined after being exposed to infected classmates. They will have to stay at home for three weeks, until the incubation period has passed.
Similar situation in South CarolinaWhere 150 children were isolated following an outbreak in Spartanburg County schools. Here too, all the affected students were unvaccinated. Minor outbreaks are also recorded in Ohio, Arizona and in other areas of the country.
“Having to quarantine so many children comes at a heavy cost to communitiesbut unfortunately these situations will occur more and more frequently,” he explained Michael Osterholmdirector of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Minnesota.
Bassetti: “The USA has gone back 50 years”
He also intervened on the situation Matteo Bassettidirector of Infectious Diseases at the San Martino Polyclinic in Genoa. “While the US president is getting vaccinated for everyone, a new measles outbreak breaks out in the United States,” he wrote on social media.
“At least 153 students from two schools in South Carolina are in quarantine for 21 days. The students were not vaccinated: it is as if the USA had returned to the 1970s, when the only way to stop the infection was to isolate people”, he added.
Bassetti recalled that measles “it is a devastating disease that can leave serious consequences in children,” underscoring how declining vaccinations are rolling back decades of health progress.”A world that is going backwards…”, he concluded.
A return that also worries Europe
The American measles boom confirms one global trend. In Italy, according to the Ministry of Health, they have been reported since January 432 cases87% of which in unvaccinated people.
International health authorities fear that misinformation about vaccines and mistrust of medicine could bring measles back to pre-pandemic levels, undoing twenty years of prevention.
