A traveler with measles spent up to 12 hours in Newark Liberty International Airport last Friday, potentially exposing countless others to the highly contagious virus, the New Jersey Health Department reports.
In an age of interplanetary ambitions and artificial intelligence, we find ourselves outwitted by a microscopic foe we once had the sense to defeat.
The New Jersey Department of Health reports that a traveler, infected with measles, spent no less than twelve hours somewhere within the sprawling labyrinth of Newark Liberty International Airport last Friday.
The precise whereabouts of this individual between 7 a.m. in Terminal B and 7 p.m. in Terminal C remain, in the department’s own words, “not available.”
This is not a mystery novel; it is a public health bulletin.
The virus, a master of opportunity, does not require a boarding pass.
This particular scene of potential contagion occurred on December 19.
Exposed individuals, should they be unlucky enough to have caught it, could develop symptoms as late as January 2.
The department, with the grim punctuality of a funeral director, advises us to mark our calendars.
The symptoms are no picnic: a blazing fever, a cough, eyes like red warning lights, and a rash that marches from the hairline downward as if mapping its conquest.
This can progress to pneumonia, encephalitis, or tragedy for a pregnant person. It is a serious disease, which makes the circumstance of its return all the more of a farce.
The numbers tell a story of backsliding. New Jersey has confirmed 11 cases this year, up from seven in 2024. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 2,012 cases across 44 jurisdictions—the highest tally since 1992.
This is eight years after the disease was declared eliminated in the United States in the year 2000. Elimination, it seems, was a status, not a guarantee.
We are engaged in a collective experiment to see how much protection we are willing to throw away for the sake of fashionable doubt.
The department, in its press release dated December 26, urges vaccination with the measles, mumps, and rubella shot. It is a safe and effective plea, repeated so often it risks becoming background noise.
They advise calling ahead before visiting a doctor if one suspects exposure, a sensible protocol to contain what should be a rare event.
Yet the underlying message is glaring: this entire anxious exercise—the contact tracing, the alerts, the worry in a crowded terminal—is largely a self-inflicted wound.
The virus exploits only the unvaccinated and the vulnerable. It travels on a cough, and remains in the air like a ghost for two hours, waiting for the hospitality of an unprepared host.
The recent resurgence of measles in the U.S., leading to record case counts in 2025, has been linked by some infectious disease specialists and public health experts to various actions and policies associated with the Trump administration.
The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic, as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), has generated significant concern among public health professionals.
Critics argue that his messaging, which has included promoting unproven treatments like Vitamin A for measles and focusing on the risks of vaccines rather than the diseases they prevent, undermines public trust in established vaccine science.
There is a peculiar modern madness at work when a society that can track a package from warehouse to doorstep cannot pinpoint the path of a contagious person in a monitored airport, and when that same society chooses to ignore a tool that makes such tracking irrelevant.
The health department’s office, reachable at (609) 984-7160, is no doubt fielding questions. The answers are already written in the medical literature.
The two-dose MMR vaccine is not a controversy; it is a shield. Its widespread use created the quiet miracle of a generation without measles. That miracle is now sputtering.
So, as we hustle through terminals B and C, perhaps on our way to celebrate human achievement elsewhere, we are reminded that progress is not a river that only flows forward.
It can eddy and stall, and sometimes it flows backward, carrying with it the ancient scourges we pretended to have left behind.
The exposure period ends January 2. The period for willful blindness should have ended long ago.