By DIANE DENISH
Corner To Corner
diane@dianedenish.com
March madness is an exciting month for basketball. For me it’s all about the New Mexico high school basketball tournament. As a Hobbs Eagle, I’ve spent decades going with friends to the March tournament.
This year as I made plans to attend the tournament, I called Hobbs friends in Albuquerque to see if they wanted to go. I was surprised when two of them expressed reluctance to attend given that Hobbs was the center of a measles outbreak with thirty-one cases at the time. They were sure that at least some of the hundreds of fans who made the trip had been exposed. I couldn’t assure them otherwise.
They were also confused about their vaccination status and if they needed to get vaccinated or have a booster. I shared that confusion as well although I found my childhood medical records. Strangely enough, it noted I had a “measles shot” in 1951 when there was no approved vaccine. I had no record of having the measles. What was I to do?
They wondered as I did about the origin of the outbreak.
How did Gaines County, Texas, and our home county of Lea near the Texas Stateline become the center of the measles outbreak? The trail led to the Mennonite community near Seminole.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s Mennonites in Mexico began to migrate to Texas when Mexico’s economy deteriorated. Gaines County, Texas was a perfect spot with farmland, tight knit religious cultures, and freedom from government pressures.
In Texas, the epicenter of the outbreak is the Mennonite community near Seminole, a community of seven thousand. One of the county’s local public-school districts, Loop, with only 153 students, has the highest school exemption rate in the state. Forty-eight percent of the district students have conscientious exemptions from required vaccinations. In 2023-24, less than half of all Loop kindergartners — forty-six percent— were given the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine, according to state data.
While Mennonites have no religious objections to vaccines, they traditionally have less interaction with the medical establishment and approach healing more holistically.
Members of this community shop in the larger community of Hobbs, NM. As a result early in the outbreak there were exposures in areas such as grocery stores, restaurants, and in some schools. Now there are fifty-two cases of measles in Lea County, two in Eddy County. Texas cases skyrocketed to 481 last week, and ten cases are reported in Oklahoma. Two unvaccinated children in Texas and one adult in Lea County have died of measles complications.
Back to the tournament. As I walked through The Pit at UNM I couldn’t help but wonder if any Hobbs fans were carrying the virus? When I saw young families with babies too young to be vaccinated, I wondered if they knew they might be exposing their precious cargo to measles? I was curious how many attendees had been misinformed, or not informed at all, because of the new policies of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? HHS has cut infectious disease monitoring and reporting, is withholding information about the spread of the measles outbreak and cut funding for public health clinics making multistate outbreaks more likely.
Kennedy traveled to Seminole for the funeral of the unvaccinated 8-year-old who died last week, the second to die on his watch. He meekly offered an endorsement of the mumps, measles, rubella vaccine as the best prevention against the spread but refused to call for universal vaccinations in all communities.
At the current spread rate, the U. S. could lose its eliminated status for measles – something it took thirty years to achieve. The HHS Secretary won’t help stop that, but you can. Ask your doctor about your status, trust science, get vaccinated.