Measles cases in the U.S. are at their highest in more than three decades. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the U.S. has 1,288 cases since the beginning of the year. That's higher than 2019, when there 1,274 cases driven by 22 outbreaks over 12 months. Eighteen states have seen outbreaks this year. Experts fear the U.S. may lose its status as having eliminated measles. There are also large outbreaks of the vaccine-preventable disease in Mexico and Canada.

A new variant of COVID-19 is circulating in parts of the world and may be driving an increase in cases in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and western Pacific regions. The World Health Organization said Wednesday the new variant called NB.1.8.1 is increasing globally and in mid-May had reached nearly 11% of sequenced samples. Current vaccines are expected to remain effective and there's nothing to suggest that the disease associated with the variant is more severe. Airport screening in the United States has detected the new variant in international travelers arriving in California, Washington state, Virginia and New York.

Public health officials say a day care facility in a Texas county that's part of the measles outbreak has multiple cases, including children too young to be fully vaccinated. West Texas is in the middle of a still-growing measles outbreak with 505 cases as of Tuesday and the state expanding the number of counties in the outbreak area this week to 10. The highly contagious virus began to spread in late January. Three people who were unvaccinated have died from measles-related illnesses this year, including two elementary school-aged children in Texas. Lubbock Public Health director Katherine Wells says day care there had seven cases as of Friday.

A child who was not vaccinated has died from measles in West Texas. It's the first death in an outbreak that began late last month and the first from measles in the U.S. since 2015. The Texas Department of State Health Services said Wednesday in a statement that the death was a "school-aged child who was not vaccinated" and had been hospitalized last week. Covenant Children's Hospital in Lubbock didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's office. There are 124 cases of measles across nine Texas counties.

Five years after the virus that causes COVID emerged in China it still holds some mysteries. The disease has killed an estimated 20 million people globally, according to the World Health Organization, and thousands are still dying every year. But scientists still aren't clear where it came from, and they are still trying to understand what causes long-term symptoms called long COVID. And while vaccines have helped dramatically reduce severe disease and death from COVID, the virus mutates so quickly researchers have struggled to find a vaccine that stops the spread.

School attendance tanked during the pandemic and has only started to recover. One reason? Parents are struggling to decide when it's OK to send a child to school while sick. During the pandemic, schools had strict COVID-19 protocols. Many parents kept kids home for days after they had a cough or fever. Schools and health experts are now saying it is OK to send children to class with some symptoms of illness, including a runny nose or cough. If your child has a fever, keep them home from school until the fever is gone for 24 hours without medication.