Before summer vacation even started, Montgomery County, Maryland, health officials were working to make sure all school-aged children have their required vaccinations before heading back to school this fall.
And according to the latest data, vaccination rates are ahead of last year’s at this time, said Dr. Kisha Davis, Montgomery County’s health officer.
“I am cautiously optimistic that our numbers of measles vaccinations and all聽school-age vaccines are good; are where they’re supposed to be,” she said Wednesday.
That’s especially important, Davis said, as more measles cases are reported across the country and in Maryland.
By late July, the U.S. had more reported cases of the measles than the 2,289 in 2025, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The measles virus in Maryland is relatively contained. This week, a new case on the Upper Eastern Shore, brought for the year.
“When we see cases in Maryland, and we do every year, we will see a few sporadic cases of measles that usually pop up outside of the county,” Davis said.
“They don’t have anywhere to spread because our vaccination rates are so high, and that’s why we are not seeing the outbreaks that we’re seeing in other states because we’ve maintained such a high vaccination rate.”
Davis spoke during Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich’s weekly briefing and was joined by Dr. Georges Benjamin, the CEO of the American Public Health Association.
“We’ve got good public health officials, a good system in Maryland,” Benjamin said, “and I encourage people to make sure, particularly now as they’re getting ready to plan going back to school, for parents to get all their kids vaccinated.”
Benjamin said that some of the reported measles cases occurred among people who were unvaccinated.
“Being unvaccinated puts you at an extraordinary risk of (contracting) vaccine-preventable diseases,” he said, “and the key word is vaccine-preventable diseases.”
And every case is a “tragedy,” Benjamin said.
“This is a disease you don’t want to get. You get really, really sick when you get measles,” he said.
Measles outbreaks also carry a high economic cost, forcing state and local governments to spend as much as $50,000 to manage each case, Benjamin said.
“That’s money that could be used for education. That’s dollars that can be used for our roads. That’s dollars that can, you know, be used for other things that the county council and the county executive and the citizens of our county聽believe are most important,” he said.
