Ana Bento

Assistant Professor

Ana Bento, assistant professor in the department of public and ecosystem health at Cornell University, currently has two pre-print papers analyzing rising cases of measles around the country.

Bento says:

“Measles was once eliminated in the U.S., but new nationwide analysis of vaccination data from more than 50,000 schools shows that the country is quietly slipping back toward conditions that can sustain large outbreaks. My colleagues and I assembled the most detailed school-by-school measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccination database to date and used a new transmission model to estimate how easily measles could spread in different communities. 

“We found that, after the Covid-19 pandemic, the share of children vulnerable to measles roughly doubled from about 5% to 10% and that in 2022–2023 many schools reached levels where a single measles case can trigger ongoing transmission, even though their counties still appear ‘safe’ on paper. 

“Our team shows that averaging vaccination rates across whole counties hides small, highly under-vaccinated schools and creates a false sense of security, especially where school-district boundaries cut across county lines and allow outbreaks to jump into neighboring, otherwise well-vaccinated areas. We argue that to prevent measles from becoming re-established in the U.S., public health agencies need to track and respond to vaccination gaps at the school level, the scale at which vulnerability actually accumulates, instead of relying on coarse county-wide averages.

“In another new study, we show that county-wide vaccination statistics can hide large differences in local outbreak risk, and it argues that to understand and prevent future measles surges, public health agencies need routine access to school-level vaccination data and tools that can identify clusters of under-vaccinated children before they seed long-running outbreaks.

“We compared Gaines County, Texas, where a 2025 outbreak was contained after 414 cases, with Spartanburg County, South Carolina, where an outbreak that began in 2025 has surpassed 900 cases and is still ongoing. Using detailed school and district vaccination data and spatial mapping methods, we found that the peak density of unvaccinated students in Spartanburg was about six times higher than in Gaines County (roughly 23 versus 4 unvaccinated children per square mile), creating a continuous corridor of under-vaccinated schools that allowed infection to keep jumping from one school community to the next. In contrast, unvaccinated students in Gaines County were concentrated in a single, relatively isolated school district, which limited the outbreak’s ability to spread outward.”