For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Kendra Pyr Lewis, in for Rachel Feldman.

It feels increasingly difficult to go a day without hearing about yet another outbreak of a vaccine preventable disease.

In 2024 protussis, also known as whooping cough, suddenly seemed to be everywhere.

Last year, the Asian recorded the most measles cases since the illness was declared eliminated

in the US in 2000. And of course, measles cases since the illness was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000.

And of course, measles outbreaks have grown increasingly common.

While it's clear these disease outbreaks are driven by a decline in vaccination rates,

we wanted to better understand why people aren't getting vaccinated, how that impacts public health,

and what, if anything, we can do about it.

So today we're joined by Lauren Young, Syam's associate editor for Health and Medicine, to dig into the subject.

Thanks for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me.

So you spent several weeks looking into what's been driving measles outbreaks across the United States.

Yeah, so this has been happening since 2025.

We saw this sort of escalation happen in Texas.

And we've just since then been seeing measles outbreaks in multiple states from Texas,

Arizona, South Carolina.

And we've been seeing this recent spike happening in Utah and Florida.

So since 2025, we've been just seeing, again, this escalation in this disease that's been

considered virtually eliminated from the U.S. in 2000.

And a huge part of the reason why it's been eliminated from the country is because of

widespread use of the measles, mumps, and rebella vaccine, or the MMR vaccine.

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