The Medical Advisor

Until this year, Dr. Leila Myrick had never seen a case of measles. She doesn’t remember professors in medical school talking about the virus. When she saw photos of the characteristic red rash on practice board exams, she flipped back through her textbooks to figure out what it was. “Most practicing doctors, in today’s day and age, are not going to see it in real life,” she said. But in the past few months, Dr. Myrick, a family medicine doctor in Seminole, Texas, has treated about 20 people with measles. She is likely to see more cases, as a raging outbreak that has infected 481 people in Texas and killed one child continues to spread. In Texas, New Mexico and other parts of the country where cases have emerged, health care workers like Dr. Myrick are confronting the highly contagious virus for the first time. On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 607 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year — more than double the number of cases seen in all of 20...