The fast-moving South Carolina measles outbreak has spread to Clemson University.
The state’s Department of Public Health has told Clemson officials that an “individual affiliated with the University” has come down with a confirmed case of the contagious disease, Clemson said in a statement.
“The individual has isolated per DPH requirements, and DPH is conducting contact tracing with individuals who may have been exposed and outlining isolation and quarantine protocols,” the statement said. “DPH will provide email notifications to any individuals identified as possible contacts who may need to quarantine.”
The statement gave no other details about the latest person to come down with an illness that was supposed to have been eliminated in the U.S. back in 2000 but has since returned at an alarming pace.
Reports of an outbreak tied to Clemson, a university with an enrollment of approximately 30,000 students located about 120 miles east of Atlanta, came just three days after NBC News reported that the measles outbreak in the Palmetto State had gone into overdrive.
The Department of Public Health on Friday announced that the total number of cases since the outbreak erupted last fall had climbed to 558 and 124 of those cases were diagnosed just since last Tuesday.
“Over the last seven to nine days, we’ve had upwards of over 200 new cases. That’s doubled just in the last week,” Dr. Johnathon Elkes, an emergency medicine physician at Prisma Health in Greenville, South Carolina, said during a media briefing Friday. “We feel like we’re really kind of staring over the edge, knowing that this is about to get a lot worse.”
Eight of the people who have contracted measles since the start of the outbreak have “required hospitalization for complications of the disease,” a Department of Public Health spokesperson told NBC News in an email.
The department did not say how many of those eight are still hospitalized.
An estimated 200 people are now “actively infected,” Prisma Health pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Robin LaCroix said at the Friday briefing.
That may be an undercount because infected people can spread the virus up to four days before symptoms appear, giving each sick individual the potential to infect a dozen more people, LaCroix said.
So far, the majority of patients reported in South Carolina are children and teenagers and most are unvaccinated, the Department of Public Health said.
Measles is frequently characterized by a splotchy red rash that often starts on the scalp and travels down the person’s body, and in some cases, it can be deadly.
There were 2,242 cases of measles reported in the U.S. last year and three were fatal, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.
Almost all of the people who came down with the disease were under the age of 20, according to the CDC. The vaccination status of 93% of the cases was listed as “unvaccinated or unknown.”