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Anguished Parents, Crying Doctors: Life Amid Utah’s Measles Outbreak.Ben Dowse hadn’t expected to treat measles when he became a doctor, but there he was, examining a newborn exposed to the virus in the womb.The infected mother had given birth just hours earlier.The hospital had alerted Dowse to the case before delivery, and he’d braced himself for the worst.Dowse wore a full-body protective suit with a plastic face mask.As a pediatrician in southern Utah, he couldn’t risk getting even a mild infection, because many of his patients are babies too young for measles vaccines or children whose parents choose not to protect them with immunizations.“I went in looking like a scientist in E.T.,” he said.Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, or death in newborns.If the baby entered the world with a measles rash and fever, Dowse was prepared to give the infant a spinal tap to assess the risk of neurological damage.Luckily, flushed and crying, the baby looked healthy.To keep it that way, Dowse wanted to inject the baby with concentrated antibodies against the measles virus.To his surprise, the parents objected, promising to give their child “all kinds of vitamin A,” Dowse said.He begged them not to, saying, “You can’t see it on the surface, but the baby’s body is fighting the measles.” They were afraid of vaccines, so Dowse explained that antibodies were different and that they would stop measles from replicating in the infant.“That shot is going to basically give the baby ammo to fight,” Dowse said.The parents relented.A couple of days later, they left the hospital with a child who had narrowly skirted an infection that killed many thousands of babies a century ago.Nonetheless, Dowse said he doubted they would be returning for childhood vaccinations to protect their baby against a bevy of illnesses.Like more than a dozen Utah doctors and health officials who spoke with KFF Health News, Dowse has adjusted his expectations.He is part of a reluctant cohort of medical professionals now on the front line of America’s regressive next chapter in health history, one in which dangerous and preventable diseases return.“I wish that people could see what I see,” said Nathan Money, a hospital pediatrician in Utah whose eyes welled up with tears as he described children he has treated for measles struggling to breathe.“This train is going in the wrong direction, and it can feel like a helpless situation, because we’re just not seeing the public messaging and leadership that’s needed to turn this around.” Since measles was deemed eliminated in the US a quarter century ago, public health workers have extinguished sporadic outbreaks in close-knit, under-vaccinated communities with targeted methods: Isolate people with measles and quarantine their contacts to contain the virus.But as vaccination rates drop nationwide, the virus is moving beyond insulated communities, overwhelming public health departments constrained by shoestring budgets.Larger outbreaks, the kind not seen for a generation, have forced health officials into a new paradigm: They have stopped racing to “contain” infections and shifted gears into what they call “mitigation.” Utah made that transition early this year, once the outbreak hit “a point where you no longer have control over it,” said state epidemiologist Leisha Nolen.By March, measles had been detected in every health jurisdiction in the state and in northern Arizona.More than 950 people have tested positive in the two states since the outbreak began in August, but many people with measles haven’t been tested.A genetic analysis of measles viruses suggested that the true number of cases last year could have been 6.5 times what was known.Last year under President Donald Trump, US measles cases exceeded 2,000 for the first time since 1992.Six months into 2026, the US has already surpassed that threshold.Prolonged outbreaks exact a toll on children, who have spent days in hospitals for severe infections and missed weeks of school for mild ones.Adults with measles miss work.Parents delay day care to keep their babies safe.Doctors in Utah have enacted labor-intensive protocols to keep measles from spreading in clinics.Newborns and people with weakened immune systems who have been exposed to the virus receive infusions of concentrated antibodies costing $500 to $1,000.Medical visits for measles can cost more than $33,000 per patient.Health departments spend millions trying to curb infections.“This is like a snowball that gathers speed as it rolls downhill,” said Emilie Morris, a hospital pediatrician in Salt Lake County and Utah County.A full-throttle campaign to educate communities on the safety of vaccines and the diseases they prevent could turn the situation around, doctors and health officials said.It would require an effort similar to what the anti-vaccine movement has long done in videos, blogs, and podcasts.For example, the anti-vaccine organization that Robert F.Kennedy Jr.founded before taking the helm at the Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Health Defense, visits vaccine-hesitant communities, produces movies, and has bought advertisements on Facebook that downplay the threat of viruses while wildly exaggerating the risk of vaccine side effects.Kennedy’s words and actions as health secretary are adding to parents’ doubt.After the development of vaccines and antibiotics in the mid-1900s, virologist and Nobel laureate Frank Macfarlane Burnet wrote, “One can think of the middle of the twentieth century as the end of one of the most important social revolutions in history, the virtual elimination of the infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life.” He couldn’t have imagined what was coming.“Year of Sickness” In communities nestled among the red sandstone cliffs and riparian forests of southern Utah, measles took hold last summer.At the main school in Hildale, a town along the Arizona border, just 30 percent of kindergartners are considered adequately immunized by Utah’s health department, meaning they’ve gotten recommended vaccines against measles, tetanus, polio, and more.Exemptions from childhood vaccine requirements are easily acquired in the state; parents need only claim personal, religious, or medical reasons.Many people in Hildale and the surrounding towns are connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a sect that has been leery of the government since a police raid in 1953 separated polygamous parents from their children.Shirlee Draper, a southern Utah resident who grew up in the faith, said they became ever more isolated in the early 2000s under the leadership of Warren Jeffs.Before he was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault against minors, Jeffs instructed his followers to withdraw from public schools and mainstream medicine.“Growing up, we all got our vaccines,” said Draper, who left the group during Jeffs’ reign.“It wasn’t until Warren Jeffs came along that there started to be more and more resistance.” After Jeffs went to prison, many people left the faith but remained concerned about vaccines because of online misinformation, such as claims that the shots are toxic.Today a small shop in Hildale sells mouth sprays and oral drops professing to detoxify vaccines.Water, glycerin, and “whole grain alcohol” are listed as ingredients in one called Vxx-Dtx.A mother who KFF Health News agreed not to name, because she fears stigmatization, said she considered getting her kids vaccinated when schools in southwest Utah started seeing measles cases last summer.She had split from the fundamentalist group but still worried about vaccines giving her children autism or other complications.Large studies published in top-tier scientific journals have refuted a link between vaccines and autism, but the anti-vaccine movement has kept the notion alive.Then the woman’s son told her that his classmate had a rash and spit on him, she said.A few days later, he fell ill with a fever, followed b