Every day, as Dr. Wendell Parkey enters his clinic in Seminole, a small city on the rural western edge of Texas, he announces his arrival to the staff with an anthem pumping loudly through speakers. As the song reaches a climax, he throws up an arm and strikes a pose in cowboy boots. “Y’all ready to stomp out disease?” he asks.
Recently, the question has taken on a dark urgency. Seminole Memorial Hospital, where Dr. Parkey has practiced for nearly three decades, has found itself at the center of the largest measles outbreak in the United States since 2019.
Since last month, more than 140 Texas residents, most of whom live in the surrounding Gaines County, have been diagnosed and 20 have been hospitalized. Nine people in a bordering county in New Mexico have also fallen ill.
On Wednesday, local health officials announced that one child had died, the first measles death in the United States in a decade.
It may not be the last. Large swaths of the Mennonite community, an insular Christian group that settled in the area in the 1970s, are unvaccinated and vulnerable to the virus.
Vaccine hesitancy has been rising in the United States for years and accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. Now the nation’s most prominent vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been named its top health official, the secretary of health and human services.
Mr. Kennedy has been particularly doubtful of measles as a public health problem, once writing that outbreaks were mostly “fabricated” to send health officials into a panic and fatten the profits of vaccine makers.
At a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy minimized the crisis in West Texas, saying that there had been four outbreaks so far this year and 16 last year.
Vaccine fears have run deep in these parts for years, and some public health experts worry that the current outbreak is a glimpse at where much of America is headed. Researchers think of measles as the proverbial canary in a coal mine. It is among the most contagious infectious diseases, and often the first sign that other pathogens may be close behind.
Measles was officially declared eliminated in the United States in 2000. Not long ago, it had become so rare that many American doctors never saw a case. But as the outbreak spread, Dr. Parkey learned to spot the signs of infection in the examination room even before he saw the telltale rashes.
On the front lines of the outbreak, simple answers aren’t easy to come by.
School-age children often zipped around the room or pestered their mothers or asked him for lollipops. The children stricken with measles sat still, vacant looks in their eyes.
On Monday, Dr. Parkey walked into a hospital room where an unvaccinated 8-year-old boy sat with that distant stare. His mother had scheduled an appointment after she noticed his barking cough the night before.
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