More than 40 measles cases have been reported at Ave Maria University in southwest Florida, the largest outbreak on a college campus in recent history.
The outbreak at the private Catholic college has raised concerns among university leaders and public health experts that measles, which has largely been considered a childhood illness, may present a growing threat to college students who aren’t vaccinated.
Measles has already disrupted several campuses across the country this year.
In South Carolina, more than 80 students at Clemson University and at Anderson University were quarantined in January after each institution reported a case on campus. Officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison notified roughly 4,000 people this month that they had been exposed to the virus. Also this month, officials at the University of Florida informed students that two classes at its Gainesville campus had been exposed.
Most colleges require students to provide proof of vaccination against measles, but many allow students to claim religious or personal exemptions. There is no national data on vaccination rates among college students, but anecdotally, universities have noticed an uptick in personal exemptions in recent years, said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, past president of the American College Health Association and chief campus health officer at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Van Orman said that many colleges are now preparing for the possibility of measles outbreaks on their campuses, something that would have been considered very unlikely just a few years ago.
“For most of us, it’s not if we’ll get a case, it’s when,” Dr. Van Orman said.
Before the measles vaccine was introduced in the 1960s, getting sick in adulthood was rare. Nearly all children got measles before they turned 15. Roughly 450 people died from the infection every year, and the rest built up natural immunity well before adulthood.
But college students today grew up in a very different world. Thanks to the country’s high vaccination rates, it’s unlikely that they would have been exposed to the virus as a child. And today’s young adults were children during the early years of the modern vaccine skepticism movement, said Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.
“We are now starting to see a group of individuals in their early 20s who are not protected,” he said. “They never had measles, they’ve never been vaccinated, and they’re in large enough numbers that we’re going to start seeing more outbreaks.”
Ave Maria University asks students to submit proof that they have received the measles vaccine, which also protects against mumps and rubella. But the college also allows students to opt out if they sign a waiver acknowledging that they are aware of the diseases’ risks, in concordance with Florida law.
The university did not respond to a request for comment. On its website, it says that the “vast majority” of people on the campus are vaccinated, but it’s unclear exactly what percentage of students have exemptions. Even slight drops in immunization rates can make a community vulnerable to an outbreak of measles, a highly contagious disease.
College campuses are also an “ideal” place for viruses like measles to spread, said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a former chairman of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee.
The campuses often bring together people from all over the country and the world, increasing the risk that an infected student will bring the virus from a place where it is spreading. And once there is a case at a university, it’s difficult to stop it from spreading through unvaccinated groups, since students live, eat, study and socialize together. It’s also possible for the virus to infect vaccinated people whose immunity from the shots may have waned over time, though that is much less common.
In the last few months, colleges have been refining their measles response plans and collecting immunization data to know which students would need to go into quarantine in the case of an exposure, Dr. Van Orman said. Some colleges are even considering stricter vaccine requirements.
This outbreak comes during an already dire period for the disease in United States history. There were 2,280 confirmed measles cases nationwide in 2025, more than any other year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000. Lauren Gardner, a public health expert who leads a measles tracking project at Johns Hopkins University, said she expected the case count this year to be even higher, in large part because of declining childhood vaccination rates.
More than 700 cases have been reported this year, most of which are connected to a raging outbreak in South Carolina. Florida has one of the highest case counts in the country, in large part because of the Ave Maria outbreak.
Teddy Rosenbluth is a Times reporter covering health news, with a special focus on medical misinformation.
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