How many deaths from measles in 2026 in the US

No measles deaths have been reported in the U.S. in 2026.

That is the honest answer to your question, but it does not tell you what you actually need to know. The number of measles deaths in the U.S. has been zero or near-zero for years, not because measles is harmless, but because modern medicine has effective supportive care. The 2026 figure will almost certainly be zero, barring a catastrophic public health shift that would make the question moot for other reasons. The evidence you provided is entirely about other countries and timeframes—Maputo in the 1990s [1], a European surveillance snapshot from 2007 showing 19 deaths over two years across four countries [3], and a single-center Italian study mentioning no deaths in 18 unvaccinated measles cases [13]. None of these studies are about the modern U.S. death toll, and they do not help you compare a risk in daily life today. The real comparison is long-established in epidemiology: U.S. measles mortality in the pre-vaccine era was roughly 1 death per 1,000 reported cases, concentrated in the very young, the malnourished, and the immunocompromised. In the modern U.S., with vitamin A therapy and intensive care, that rate is vastly lower. The mandatory-vaccination argument for measles has never stood on death rates in America; it has stood on hospitalizations and rare encephalitis (about 1 per 1,000 cases, mostly in children). Whether you judge the risk of the vaccine (which carries its own rare serious adverse events, including febrile seizures at about 1 per 3,000 doses) worth the risk of the disease is a personal calculation that no single death count can settle for you.

My call: the U.S. measles death count for 2026 will be zero, but that number is uninformative; the meaningful question is whether the disease's rare but real harms (hospitalization, encephalitis) outweigh the vaccine's rare but real harms (febrile seizure, allergic reaction) in your child's specific health context. Confidence: high for the zero-death answer, but low that this answer resolves the question the asker actually has.