Welcome to Paging Dr. Gupta.

You know, I just got back from West Texas.

I was covering the measles outbreak there, and it was really interesting to be on the ground in the middle of all that.

There's a sense of frustration among a lot of the citizens, a lot of the health care workers

that were experiencing this sort of outbreak at all.

I think there are people who are really frightened about what is unfolding, especially

people who have members of their family or who they themselves are immunocompromised.

They're worried about contracting measles.

And then I think there's a real sense of just

trying to figure out what is going to happen next. Like how much is this measles outbreak likely to

grow? We obviously don't know the answers to those questions, but I will tell you that if you

talk to health officers on the ground, they will tell you that this outbreak's

probably going to last for months. And there's going to be several hundred people, ultimately,

who do get the measles. So that's what they're sort of preparing for. You know, we don't

talk about measles much anymore, and that's in large part because it was

considered eliminated in the United States back in 2000.

That means they hadn't seen a new case of measles for many years in the United States.

Many of the doctors who are now caring for these patients with measles, this is the first

time they've actually seen a patient with measles. So I think that's the source of

frustration that these are vaccine preventable diseases and here we are taking care of them.

A big part of the reason why we're seeing an uptick in numbers is because of lower vaccination rates.

That's what it's allowed these cases to pop up again.

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