Pennsylvania reported five measles-associated deaths in an Oct. 14 update, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lists three nationally; separate systems complicate the comparison.
The Pennsylvania Department of Health said it was investigating a reported death in Franklin County. The Franklin County Coroner’s Office said the death met Pennsylvania’s definition of a measles-associated death, but the case was not part of the state’s five-death tally.
The figures are not necessarily equivalent measures: Pennsylvania and the CDC use different reporting systems. The CDC is working with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists on a common definition for measles deaths. Earlier EconoTimes coverage of the separate tallies also described the difference between the state and federal counts.
The Guardian reported that the CDC dashboard’s third death entry appeared Wednesday without naming the state. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) told the newspaper that privacy obligations and legal limits kept the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) from providing the state or additional case details.
Law professors Dorit Reiss of UC Law San Francisco and Lindsay Wiley of UCLA Law told the Guardian that naming a state alone would not reveal the deceased person’s identity. Debra Houry, a former CDC chief medical officer, told the newspaper Pennsylvania was right to examine the Franklin County case before classifying it.
The Guardian also reported that the CDC moved death reporting from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) to NCHS in September. The newspaper described NNDSS as quicker and more likely to identify the state, while state information may be absent from NCHS records when few deaths are involved. The Guardian said the CDC has not publicly explained the change.
The CDC reported 4,410 confirmed measles cases in the United States as of Oct. 15, compared with 2,289 for all of 2025. Its work with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists is aimed at establishing a shared basis for classifying measles deaths.
