ASHEVILLE, N.C. — At around 2 a.m., 7-year-old twin brothers arrived at Mission Hospital in Asheville. Both had a fever, a cough, a rash, pink eye, and cold symptoms.. This story also ran on USA Today. It can be republished for free.. The boys sat in one waiting room and then another. Two hours and 20 minutes passed before the two were isolated, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services records obtained by KFF Health News. Then two more hours ticked by.. As the sun rose, an emergency room doctor called the state epidemiologist and described the symptoms. The public health official told him to keep the kids in the hospital and quarantine them. Shortly after that call, the patients were diagnosed.. It was measles.. Hospital staff gave the father instructions on how to quarantine the family and sent them home.. The virus exposed at least 26 other people in the hospital that January day, federal investigators determined. Health inspectors for CMS investigated the measles infections and other failures in care and concluded that the twins’ symptoms should have triggered an isolation procedure for which Mission Hospital staffers had trained seven months earlier. CMS designated Mission in “Immediate Jeopardy” for the exposures and other unrelated issues, one of the most severe sanctions a hospital can face, threatening to pull federal funding unless it remedied the problems.. A spokesperson for Mission said its staff was trained to manage airborne sickness and is following federal rules.. As U.S. hospitals face an increasing risk of encountering measles, and pressure to immediately spot it, health care workers face an unusual barrier: Many don’t know what it looks like.. “There’s a word, ‘morbilliform’ — it means measles-like, and there are lots of viruses that can cause a rash that looks like a measles rash in children,” said Theresa Flynn, a pediatrician in Raleigh and the president of the North Carolina Pediatric Society. In 30 years in health care, she’s never seen a measles case, she said.. Email Sign-Up. Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free weekly newsletter, “The Week in Brief.”. Your Email Address Sign Up. North Carolina has reported more than 20 cases since mid-December, and more than 3,000 people nationwide have been infected since the beginning of 2025.. Children in areas with low immunization rates have been especially susceptible to outbreaks, triggering public health campaigns to promote the measles vaccine. CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz encouraged vaccination in a CNN interview on Feb. 8.. With two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, a person has a 3% chance of getting the virus after exposure. If exposed, an unvaccinated person has a 90% chance of being infected, according to the CDC. It can take a week or two before someone infected with measles shows symptoms.. But for the past year, the Trump administration has sown doubt about vaccine effectiveness. Health and Human Services Secretary Robe
