South Carolina's two-month measles outbreak reached 84 cases on Friday. Concentrated in the Upstate, it is eight more cases than the state reported on Tuesday and resulted in four more Spartanburg County schools sending students into quarantine.
The state's total count of cases for the year is up to 87, and the new exposures added more than 120 people to the quarantine list since the South Carolina Department of Public Health's Tuesday report. Select students at Fairforest Elementary, Fairforest Middle, Rainbow Lake Middle and Dorman High — Freshman Campus will stay in quarantine until sometime between Dec. 11 and Dec.15 should they not fall ill.
Of the new identified cases, seven are linked to household members of previously identified cases. The source of one is still under investigation.
As cases in the Upstate continue to spread, state epidemiologist Dr. Linda Bell recommended in a Wednesday media briefing for South Carolinians to seek out a vaccination for measles — should they not already be vaccinated.
About one in five people with measles will be hospitalized, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
University of South Carolina associate professor Dr. Melissa Nolan, who also directs the university's Institute for Infectious Disease Translational Research, agreed with Bell's recommendation.
Nolan said even without hospitalization, the disease's symptoms like a fever or a rash can lead to extended quarantines, isolation and pain.
Just 92.8% of students in the Upstate region received their required immunizations through the end of the 2024-2025 school year, according to the South Carolina Department of Public Health. It is the lowest percentage of any region in the state and a drop from the region's 96% student immunization rate during the 2020-2021 school year.
In the state's recently released 45-day report of schools with required immunization certifications for the 2025-2026 school year, about 88.7% of students at schools in Spartanburg County had been inoculated. It is the lowest rate among students of any South Carolina county. At a school like Global Academy of SC, two of every ten children have their required vaccinations.
The threshold for preventing the spread of measles and reaching herd immunity is 95%. Nineteen of the 93 Spartanburg County schools included in the state's report reached that threshold, but these students interact with children beyond the confine of their school walls. For children especially, Nolan said their social behaviors could lead to the disease's spread in a different matter than in adults.
"They share items. Even in the schools where people are constantly cleaning things, they can't prevent everything," she said.
As a mother, Nolan said she understood the want to protect a child. And while people choose to forgo recommended vaccinations, whether because of personal choice or religious exemption, which Spartanburg County has seen a boom in, she said it is vital to understand the risks associated with the decision.
"It's not just the acute impacts, so the quarantining. You're going to have to take off time from work to be with your child for example — that's less money that you're able to make from work," she said.
With growth in large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini being used to interpret medical information, Nolan said it is important for people to not use chatbots or singular internet searches as their only guidance.
"Nobody gave me a book when my child was born that says the proper way to raise your child," she said. "And in trying to make these early-life decisions, people are going online for help to make these choices and may see more and more information that is inaccurate."
The majority of people infected in the state's measles outbreak were minors; seventy-six of the 84 cases were children, and 18 of the cases were children aged younger than five. Of these cases, 77 people were unvaccinated.
