NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Though Tennessee has not reported any measles cases in 2025, the state’s vaccination rates have been decreasing for years.
“Measles is not a trivial infection,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said. “It has serious complications.”
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According to Maury Regional Health, measles is a highly contagious viral disease with symptoms like high fever, cough, runny nose and a red rash that typically starts on the face and spreads to the rest of the body. An infected person can spread measles for up to four days before a rash appears and up to four days after it first appears.
“This is a fairly long period of time that a person could spread this disease,” Dr. Christina Lannom, Chief Medical Officer at Maury Regional Health, explained. “So if you are traveling and you don’t know that you are spreading the disease, then of course you are going to put people at risk.”
Doctors warn that measles can lead to severe complications like pneumonia, brain inflammation and even death.
“Before we had [the] vaccine in the 1960s, 400 to 500 children died in the United States — died — each year due to measles and its complications,” Schaffner added.
“It’s a national concern already because we have areas that are less immunized than others,” Lannom said.
The Tennessee Department of Health has noticed a drop in the MMR — or measles mumps and rubella — vaccination rate for children between two and three years old. For example in Williamson County, 44.3% of children between two and three received their MMR vaccines in December 2019. However, by last December, that had dropped to 33.6%.
“Across the state, some parents are expressing hesitancy about administering measles [the] vaccine,” Schaffner said. “It is safe. I keep saying, ‘Talk to your doctor.”
“This is based on some previous media and verbal information that the vaccine was unsafe,” Lannom said. “This has been proven untrue.”
The CDC recommends all children get two doses of the MMR vaccine with the first dose given between 12 and 15 months of age and the second given when children are between four and six years old.
For immunocompromised children who can’t get the vaccine, Schaffner and Lannom both told News 2 that if everyone around them gets the vaccine, they’ll be safer.
“Those are the vulnerable populations that we need to be protecting,” Lannom said.
Doctors said if you have any questions or concerns about you or your child’s vaccination status, you should reach out to your pediatrician or family doctor.
