Three cases of measles have been reported in New Jersey, all connected to a single child who was not vaccinated against the disease, health officials said.
The child visited PromptMD Urgent Care in Fort Lee on Feb. 8 and two more health care facilities on Feb. 9: Englewood Hospital and Hackensack University Medical Center, according to the Bergen Record.
Officials said the two additional infected people, both of whom were also unvaccinated, had close contact with the initial patient, NJ.com reported. All three people have now been placed in quarantine.
The child who first contracted the disease had recently traveled abroad before returning home to New Jersey, according to the Record. They have not been identified further.
The spread of measles in New Jersey comes amid a significant outbreak of the disease in West Texas, where at least 124 people were infected as of Tuesday. One child also died from the disease in Texas, the first measles death in the U.S. since 2015 and the second since 2003.
Though measles was largely eradicated from the U.S. around the turn of the century thanks to a vaccine that is 97% effective, the rise of vaccine skepticism in recent years has led to a bit of a comeback for the highly contagious disease.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading vaccine critic, dismissed the outbreak in Texas and the child’s death as “not unusual” on Wednesday at a meeting of President Trump’s cabinet — even though it was only the nation’s second measles death in 20 years.