As the United States is swarmed with measles, helped along by the dangerous irresponsibility of anti-vaxxers, some people need a reminder that while most measles infections are brutal but survivable, in some cases, the virus can tear apart a child’s brain.
In a recent and timely report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors detailed the case of a 7-year-old boy who died from subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a delayed and almost universally fatal neurological complication of measles.
The child had contracted measles at 7 months old while living in Afghanistan, where the virus remains endemic. Years later, he developed seizures and cognitive decline. Months later, he lost the ability to speak. An MRI showed extensive brain damage, and tests of his spinal fluid revealed high levels of measles antibodies.
He was dead a year after symptoms arose.
Measles Is Horrific. The Resulting Complications Can Be Worse.
While some treat measles like just another childhood disease, it can potentially be much more serious than that. Measles can inflame the brain in several ways, leading to permanent damage or even death. There’s primary measles encephalitis, where the virus directly invades the brain during infection. And then there’s acute postinfectious encephalitis, triggered by an abnormal immune response shortly after recovery. Each one has around a 1 in 1,000 chance of affecting a child post-infection.
SSPE is rarer and more insidious. Caused by a mutated strain of the virus that lingers in the body and doesn’t rear its ugly head until 6 to 8 years after infection. If you refused to give your child the measles vaccine, and then they were infected and made it through the other side, there’s still a chance that the effects of the infection could boomerang back years after infection. In the case of SSPE, which affects about one in 25,000 children with measles, once symptoms appear, it’s almost always fatal.
What’s frightening, according to the report, is that amid the ongoing (and totally preventable) outbreak in the US, neurological complications are already cropping up. Since early 2025, more than 3,000 measles cases have been reported nationwide. In South Carolina, at least 19 have been hospitalized with severe complications, including children with encephalitis. Viewing it nationally, hundreds have been hospitalized, and three people, two of them children, have died since last year.
All this for a virus that was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, thanks to widespread vaccinations. Twenty-six years later, thousands are infected, and the death toll is rising. This is a reminder that immunization remains and likely always will be highly effective at preventing infection and dramatically reducing severity in cases where it still somehow breaks through the vaccine’s protections.
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