As measles spreads, these 9 vaccine-preventable diseases could be next

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There are more than 900 confirmed measles cases in the United States, as of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent weekly count. It’s less than two months into the year, “and we already have over a quarter of [the measles cases] we had all of 2025, so things are not great,” said Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health.

When it comes to infectious diseases, measles is “the canary in the coal mine,” according to Wallace.

“Measles is the most contagious disease that we have, period,” Wallace told writer Kathleen Felton. “So as soon as we start to see measles, we know that the [vaccination] rates in that county or state are starting to drop, and so other diseases will follow on to that, but they just take longer to rip through the communities.”