Officials in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, announced Monday that a woman recently died after a “past diagnosis of measles with treatment.”
The Franklin County Coroner’s Office said in a release that the patient, whom it did not identify, was a 39-year-old woman with underlying conditions, including her measles diagnosis. The coroner’s office did not say if the woman was still sick with measles at the time of her death.
A spokesperson for the coroner’s office told NBC News that her “primary cause of death was a probable acute cardiac event due to possible complications of the measles,” adding that the patient was unvaccinated.
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The coroner’s office also said that her case was the first in years in the county involving someone with a recent measles diagnosis and that it met the Pennsylvania state standard for a “measles-associated death.”
The Pennsylvania Department of Health says that “a confirmed measles-associated death is a death that occurs within 30 days of symptom onset in an individual with clinical evidence of a measles infection and a positive laboratory test and that is not due to unrelated causes (e.g., motor vehicle accident).”
The Franklin County death is not listed in the death count maintained by state health officials.
Neil Ruhland, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Health, told The Independent that “our team has reached out to the coroner’s office and is conducting a thorough review of the reported death. We will update the public after our investigation is finished.”
As of Friday, the last time the state dashboard was updated, Pennsylvania confirmed 1,124 cases of measles since April, with 218 people hospitalized and five deaths. Less than 1% of the patients in the Pennsylvania measles outbreak have been vaccinated, state health officials said.
There were 12 measles cases across the state from January to March, with one person hospitalized and zero deaths, according to the state measles dashboard.
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