14 May 8th-May 14th, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | within six days of their exposure. County health departments also issue public service announcements in the form of physical posters, community events and online posts. These advertise the commu- nicable disease hotline, which residents can call if they come across a suspected case. It also tells them where they can get vaccinated in the county and what families can do to protect themselves. Smaller counties like Gila County rely more on community partners, such as nurses, school administrators, hospitals and community health centers. Their resources are fewer. But both large and small county health departments have been prepped not only by past measles cases but also by having recently battled, you know, the worst pandemic in 100 years. “COVID really prepared us, to be honest with you,” said Savannah Barajas, an epide- miologist at the Gila County Health Department. The west Texas outbreak has acceler- ated those preparations. Since that explo- sion of cases, Pima County’s team has met every Friday for a month to get ready for a measles outbreak in their backyard. They’ve also been ramping up communica- tion with community partners and updating messaging. Gila County has been running tabletop exercises to prepare while also upping vaccine communication with residents. In one sense, the Texas outbreak is doing half the work for them. “Since the outbreaks have been publicized, we are getting more people coming in to get vaccines,” Barajas said. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the saying goes, and the measles vaccine is mighty preventative. “Vaccines are highly, highly effective for this particular condition,” Saal said. “No one should ever lose their child to a condi- tion that is fully preventable.” While health officials feel prepared, they’re arguably not as prepared as they were six months ago. In late March, the federal government cut nearly $240 million of Arizona’s public health funding, cutting into grants for epidemiology and vaccines for children that were funneled to all 15 county health departments. Mohave County eliminated the positions of two health navigators and one communicable disease investigator, both of whom would help the county contain an outbreak. Two public health nurse positions were elimi- nated in Yavapai County. Maricopa County has had to scale back its mobile clinics, which helped to provide vaccines to unin- sured people, those with disabilities and folks who live in rural areas. The upshot is this: Arizona has fewer resources to get kids vaccinated against measles, and fewer resources to contain an outbreak if one occurs, especially in rural areas. County health officials who spoke to Phoenix New Times for this story all expressed their confidence in their ability to respond to a measles outbreak, but it will also require doing the same job with less money. “Any time that budget cuts result in our loss of staff, that does affect our ability to respond,” Staab said. “Our responses are very dependent on people, so when we lose those people, it does impact us.” So how ready is Arizona for a measles outbreak? Perhaps both readier than you might assume, especially given statewide vaccination rates, and not as ready as anyone who believes in vaccines would prefer. Some areas of the state and the Valley are at particular risk. For the next two months, Ibarra will wait on eggshells until her boys can receive their first dose of the measles vaccine. Had they been born 20 years earlier, when measles was down for the count, there’d be little to worry about. That’s not the world we live in anymore. “They’re so vulnerable,” she said. And in Arizona, measles could strike at any second. Measles vaccination rates in some Arizona counties are lower than that of the Texas county where the nationwide measles outbreak began. (Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images) Bracing for Impact from p 12
