Texas ICE center
A public health emergency': doctors sound alarm on measles outbreak at Texas ICE center
Nancy M. Preyor-Johnson
Mon, February 2, 2026 at 5:20 PM EST
SUMMARY:
Warning of a potential public health crisis, physicians at UT Health San Antonio are calling for an urgent, coordinated effort to contain a measles outbreak at a federal immigrant detention center in South Texas.
Two cases of measles have been confirmed at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, 70 miles southwest of San Antonio.
The discovery has raised concern because detainees, staff and contractors move in and out of the facility routinely and because some families were released or transferred shortly before or after the outbreak was disclosed on Sunday. Measles is highly contagious and poses a special risk to infants and young children who have not been vaccinated.
In a letter to the state's top health official, Dr. Lee C. Rogers, chief of podiatric medicine and surgery at UT Health San Antonio, called for "an immediate, unified command-and-control of the measles outbreak."
The letter, addressed to Dr. Jennifer Shuford, commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, bore the heading: "Public Health Emergency: The measles outbreak at Dilley Detention Center will become an epidemic if we don't act immediately."
"This is a public health emergency," Rogers wrote. "This is not a law enforcement issue." He wrote that in a detention center, where people live in close contact and breathe the same air, "everyone has to be presumed exposed." He said that releases or transfers of detainees during an outbreak could spread the virus beyond South Texas.
LINK:
Doctors at UT Health San Antonio are pressing for coordinated action to prevent the outbreak from spreading beyond an immigrant detention center in Dilley.
P.S.
"Rogers said he was speaking out even though infectious diseases are not his specialty because he believed other physicians would be reluctant to do so.
UT Health officials said Rogers was voicing his own views and was not speaking on behalf of the institution."
COMMENT: I'm with Rogers!.. of course releases or transfers of detainees/people during an outbreak will spread the virus beyond South Texas and not only that this is unethical and immoral to not treat and prevent illnesses amongst detainees.
My grandfather was in WW2 and he said his own prisoners of war tried to nurse him when he caught malaria. We are all in the same boat when it comes to contagious illnesses...
..."In World War II, American soldiers generally treated German and Italian prisoners of war (POWs) well,
often adhering to Geneva Convention standards, providing good food, medical care, and, in the U.S., opportunities for labor, education, and recreation(there were exceptions but the overall trend was positive)" Regardless more measles equals more measles for everybody therefore...
I say disease and illness is the common enemy.
When it comes to contagious illness,
What goes around comes around.
"the measles virus can and does mutate, just like other single-stranded RNA viruses (such as influenza or COVID-19). However, unlike those viruses, measles mutations rarely lead to new variants that can escape the immune protection provided by the measles vaccine"..
...the keyword here is
rarely. ..That being said it only stands to reason that if the more measles circulates amongst masses of people that might greaten the chance of mutation and make make a
rare instance happen as
rare as that might be. Just because something is rare doesn't mean it can't or won't happen. Its certainly is not something I'd play around with . I don't gamble on such things personally. With my luck, something 'rare' might happen. I don't like relying on luck...I like a sure thing.
I'd rather be a 'no-risk' kind of guy than a 'low risk' one,
The Masked Man
