Lancaster County Coroner Stephen Diamantoni said on Friday that measles caused the death of a six-week-old girl, upgrading a case his office had previously described only as measles-associated. It is the first time in the Pennsylvania outbreak that a medical certifier has named the virus as the cause of a death rather than as a finding that happened to be present.
The determination arrived the same day the CDC raised the national count for the year to 3,134 confirmed cases, a figure the agency has not recorded since 1991. For families in Lancaster County and the counties around it, the practical question has narrowed. How deaths are classified is now separate from the immediate matter of whether a household has an infant, a pregnant member, or an unvaccinated child inside an area where the virus is circulating.
