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Vaccine hesitancy has been rising for years in the United States. Doctors and parents in one rural county are confronting the consequences.
Photographs by Desiree Rios
Teddy Rosenbluth traveled to West Texas to meet the doctors and residents coping with a growing measles outbreak.
Feb. 28, 2025Updated 1:09 p.m. ET
Every day, as Dr. Wendell Parkey enters his clinic in Seminole, a small city on the rural western edge of Texas, he announces his arrival to the staff with an anthem pumping loudly through speakers.
As the song reaches a climax, he throws up an arm and strikes a pose in cowboy boots. “Y’all ready to stomp out disease?” he asks.
Recently, the question has taken on a dark urgency. Seminole Memorial Hospital, where Dr. Parkey has practiced for nearly three decades, has found itself at the center of the largest measles outbreak in the United States since 2019.
Since last month, more than 140 Texas residents, most of whom live in the surrounding Gaines County, have been diagnosed and 20 have been hospitalized. Nine people in a bordering county in New Mexico have also fallen ill.
On Wednesday, local health officials announced that one child had died, the first measles death in the United States in a decade.
It may not be the last. Large swaths of the Mennonite community, an insular Christian group that settled in the area in the 1970s, are unvaccinated and vulnerable to the virus.
