The Lancaster County coroner’s office in Pennsylvania is investigating the death of another child who tested positive for measles, the county coroner said on Tuesday.
The coroner, Dr. Stephen Diamantoni, said his office is still working to determine the cause of death.
It was not yet clear whether this case was one of the two deaths announced by Pennsylvania state health officials last week, or whether it represented an additional death. The news of the investigation was first reported by the local ABC News affiliate in the county.
The development comes amid a growing controversy over whether the two deaths reported by the state health department last week, one identified as an infant, were a result of measles or merely coincided with the infection — especially in the case of the infant, whose immediate cause of death was a lacerated spleen. State health officials have not released any details about the second death.
The announcement of those deaths was followed by back and forth between federal, state and local officials, including Mr. Diamantoni, who said last week his office had been notified of only one death. (In Pennsylvania, not all deaths must be reported to a coroner’s office.)
The conflict escalated this weekend, as Dr. Erica Schwartz, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, instructed staff not to include the two deaths in the agency’s national measles count, breaking with the C.D.C.’s normal procedure of accepting the data reported by states. That move came after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed on social media that the deaths “may even have been altogether fabricated” by the office of Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic governor.
Lancaster County is at the center of a rapidly growing measles outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people and hospitalized 87. Many public health experts believe this number is a vast undercount, given that local Mennonite and Amish communities tend to avoid traditional health care and so may not be included in those tallies.
Improving childhood vaccination rates has long been a challenge within the area’s Amish communities, where just a quarter of people have been vaccinated against measles, according to a 2025 estimate. The Covid-19 pandemic was a major setback in efforts to increase vaccination rates, said Allen Hoover, an Old Order Mennonite. Mr. Hoover spent nearly two decades leading this work as the administrator at Parochial Medical Center, a clinic that mainly serves these communities. .
But Mr. Hoover said the current measles outbreak has reminded locals why vaccines are so important, adding that the vaccine clinics in the area have been well attended.
“This is really persuading people to get immunized again,” he said.
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