CDC scraps plan to help Texas schools curb measles over layoffs, employee says

Source: CBS News

Updated on: April 17, 2025 / 7:58 PM EDT


The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has scrapped a plan to offer help curbing measles in Texas schools after some staff working on the agency's response to this year's record outbreak of the virus were warned they could face layoffs, an agency employee said.

CDC officials had initially weighed expanding a service they had been offering to hospitals in Texas — onsite assessments to root out how errors in ventilation and air filtration could be enabling spread of the virus – to other kinds of facilities like schools as well.

"Being on the ground allows us to actually look at the filters that are in place, look at the HVAC systems, how they're set up, how they're being used, how they're being monitored. And after seeing what we did, I'm glad we did," Dylan Neu, who had led the CDC's ventilation assessments in Texas, told CBS News.

Neu is a biomedical engineer for the CDC's National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, which was largely eliminated by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s first wave of layoffs earlier this month.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cdc-scraps-plan-to-help-texas-schools-curb-measles-more-layoffs-loom/