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To understand the virus’s re-emergence in America in 2025, some experts are looking to a past epidemic that had a high death rate in Philadelphia.
Aug. 20, 2025, 1:50 p.m. ET
Few expected a major return of measles to the United States this year, a quarter-century after it was declared eliminated here.
But return it has, with more than 1,300 confirmed cases this year and three deaths. Public health officials say they have seen nothing like it since the winter of 1990 to 1991, when measles last swept the country.
For some, like Justin Johnson, who was 12 in that epidemic year, it was an eerie time. Schools closed and doctors showed up at families’ homes, including his, to examine children. He was one of 13 children in a joyful and loving Philadelphia family who ate dinner together every night around a huge table.
Mr. Johnson, now 46 and living in Lancaster, Pa., was the first in his family to get measles. Then the disease spread to his siblings. Some of them did not survive.
He was part of a major outbreak in Philadelphia that winter. The disease first spread among poor children in the inner city and then ravaged children whose families were members of a church. The death rate was so high — one in 35 as compared with the usual one in 1,000 — that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a team to see if the virus had mutated.
Mr. Johnson’s close-knit family was part of that church.
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