Health Alert as cases of the measles continue to spread here in Texas.

Over the last few weeks, a small community in West Texas, just on the border with New Mexico,

has been grappling with a public health crisis,

a cluster of measles spreading from an isolated Mennonite community outwards.

This mother and her eight children, some of whom were coughing and had a fever,

got tested this week at a mobile site in the outbreak's epicenter, Gaines County.

This started as two cases in Gaines County, and unsurprisingly, in a short amount of time,

it's now 48.

Dr. Adam Ratner is an infectious disease specialist who just happens to have written a whole book about measles.

It's called booster shots.

That is alarming. And I know that it sounds like a small number of cases, but it's really not.

Measles is the most contagious disease that we know. I would not be surprised to see those

case numbers go up significantly in the coming

days. Dr. Ratner was right about that. Almost as soon as we got off the phone, Texas health officials

announced that 10 more people had been diagnosed. Most were unvaccinated, kicking off a frantic race to protect people.

I got a sense of how difficult it might be to communicate about this outbreak in Gaines County.

When I logged onto the Facebook page for the local hospital that's trying to get in front of this

outbreak, they're doing like drive-through clinics, things like that, to just get

shots in arms. And a lot of the comments on this Facebook page were just infused with misinformation.

People saying stuff like telling people to have their kids vaccinated instead of letting

parents make that choice sounds like the blind giving

advice to the seeing. And people saying stuff like, please do your research before getting vaccinated

...