Wage gains for lower-paid Wisconsin workers have continued in 2026, but a halt in job creation suggests that might not last, says the author of a new report released ahead of Labor Day.

“The State of Working Wisconsin 2026” tells a good news-bad news story for Wisconsin’s workforce, but one that could become less favorable under current conditions.

“For working people in Wisconsin, the Labor Day 2026 picture is mixed,” the report states. “While overall unemployment remains low, the state isn’t adding jobs and Black unemployment is growing. While the median wage has reached an all-time high, surging inflation in 2026 means that wage growth is likely coming to an end.”

The report is a product of the High Road Strategy Center, based at the University of Wisconsin. It was written by Laura Dresser, the center’s associate director, along with Joel Rogers, the director, and Leslie Vasquez. The center was founded 30 years ago as the Center on Wisconsin Strategies (COWS).

The report’s best news is the continued wage growth, particularly for lower-wage workers, Dresser said in an interview. That has been consistent since about 2018, she said.

Except for a period early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when many businesses cut back and there was a brief, sharp increase in layoffs, the unemployment rate has also been consistently low, and employers have complained about the difficulty in filling jobs.

“Workers have more bargaining power, and they’ve managed to turn that into wage increases,” Dresser said. “That’s much more true in the lower-wage jobs than it is in the higher wage jobs.”

The lowest-paid 20% of workers have made the strongest wage gains, while the wage increases have been the smallest for the workers whose pay puts them in the 80th percentile —those who earn more than 80% of the workforce — she said.

Job growth, however, has slowed down in the last year and a half.

“Since late 2024, Wisconsin’s job market has gone flat,” the report states. From 2020 through most of 2024, Wisconsin’s economy was steadily adding jobs, setting new records.

In November 2024, the state hit a record high of 3,051,000 jobs, according to the report. Since then the total number of jobs has diminished, marking 3,042,900 jobs in July.

“We are not seeing increasing numbers of jobs over the last year and a half,” Dresser said — which, she observed, is parallel to a national trend of “anemic” job growth.

The construction industry remains particularly strong in Wisconsin job growth, according to the report, with jobs growing at twice the rate for construction jobs nationwide in the last six years, according to the report.

Wisconsin leisure and hospital jobs grew 1.6% in that period, while nationally they “barely grew at all,” according to the report. And manufacturing jobs are 4% below what they were in February 2020, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns.

“Wisconsin is losing manufacturing jobs and losing them much more rapidly than the national decline,” the report states.

Tariff policies have shifted unpredictably since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 owing both to shifting policies in the administration as well as court cases that have overturned some of the administration’s tariffs.

The report cites research from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., that concludes the tariff policies have done little to change the nation’s balance of trade with other countries, while reducing both imports and exports.

Wage growth could be coming to an end as well. If unemployment increases, workers may feel less able to seek better pay and working conditions, according to the report.

In 2026, inflation has driven up costs particularly for energy, fuel and utilities. “And national evidence is that inflation is growing faster than wage growth this year — that’s a big warning light that we’ll get thrown off that wage trend we’ve been on,” Dresser said.

While wage gains have been especially strong for Black workers over the last six years in Wisconsin — increasing 17% for Black women and 14% for Black men — the report also sees a persistent inequality along racial lines.

“Unemployment has stayed really low, but in the last year Black unemployment has gone up by a full percentage point while white unemployment has held steady,” Dresser said.

The failure of Wisconsin to raise the state minimum wage — which remains at $7.25 an hour — and the persistence of state laws enacted in the last decade weakening unions for public employees as well as in the private sector are also making it more difficult for workers, according to the report.

“Unions, made up of working people, help increase the power and standards of living of working people,” the report states. And they have been actively organizing in Wisconsin, although the renewed enthusiasm for unions hasn’t yet produced broad gains in membership, which has diminished to 5% of the private sector workforce.

Affordability has become a widespread buzzword in political campaigns for 2026, and the report suggests that can be viewed in more than one way.

“While the question of affordability is generally framed as a problem of the cost of living, the problem is equally or even better understood as a problem of suppressed pay,” the report states. “Raising the minimum wage and making it easier to join a union would both increase paychecks.”

The measles outbreak reported earlier this month in Southwest Wisconsin has increased markedly this week, the state health department reported Friday.

With newly identified cases, the total number of people in Grant, Iowa and Lafayette counties confirmed with the viral illness has increased to 92, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. Another six people have been identified as probably having measles.

In addition to those 98 patients, two other people in Wisconsin were diagnosed with measles at the beginning of 2026. All but one of the 100 Wisconsinites with confirmed or probable measles this year had not been vaccinated, according to DHS.

Of all Wisconsin measles patients this year, 40% are 18 years old or older, 46% are 5 to 17 years old and 14% are age 4 or younger, according to DHS. The department doesn’t publish the demographic information for specific outbreaks.

So far the Southwest Wisconsin outbreak has not been spreading through general public exposure, according to DHS.

“There’s ongoing transmission of disease from previously identified cases,” said Dr. Stephanie Schauer, DHS immunization program manager, in a video recorded by the department Friday. “So this speaks to the very infectious nature of measles.”

Nine out of 10 people who are susceptible to measles and exposed to someone with the virus, such as a family member or a person they live with, will come down with the illness, she said.

“So if one person in that household becomes sick with measles, and then they expose others in that household, those others are likely to become sick about 10 to 14 days later,” Schauer said.

The measles vaccine — typically delivered in combination with mumps and rubella vaccines — remains the best prevention from the virus, Schauer said.

Earlier this week the Centers for Disease Control reported 2,777 measles cases nationwide. The first two deaths from measles in the U.S. this year were confirmed this week in Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported.

An outbreak of measles in two counties reported earlier this month has spread and is affecting 48 people, the state health department reported Friday.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services has identified a total of 41 confirmed cases and seven “probable” cases, reported in Grant, Iowa and Lafayette counties. They include two cases in Grant County, which were reported earlier this week, and 35 in Iowa County.

In Lafayette County, the count is now four confirmed measles cases and seven probable cases. One of the confirmed cases is new, along with the four probable cases, DHS reported in an updated announcement. 

So far DHS has not found evidence of public exposure to the virus, meaning the cases identified so far appear to have been spread between people who knew each other.

State health officials are recommending that people check their vaccination status. The MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine is the best protection against measles, health officials say.

DHS is recommending that anyone who isn’t sure whether they have the MMR vaccine check their vaccination status at the Wisconsin Immunization Registry or with their local public health department or healthcare provider.

A federal report in July found that nationwide, measles cases have reached their highest level in 35 years. The reemergence of the viral illness, which public health experts said had been eliminated by 2000, coincides with declining vaccination rates in the U.S.

Since Jan. 1, the number of Wisconsin measles cases has grown to 50, according to DHS, and with one exception, everyone who has taken ill was not vaccinated for the disease. 

DHS operates a Measles Dashboard and a webpage for Outbreaks and Investigations that supplies more public information about public health conditions, with 12% of cases in children age 4 or younger, 44% in children ages 5 to 17, and 44% in adults 18 or older.

This report was updated with additional information from DHS.

Hospital costs in Wisconsin are about 26% higher than in Illinois, according to a new study comparing the two states, but a hospital trade association questions the report’s methods and disputes its conclusions.

The reason for the difference isn’t certain, says the report’s co-author, University of Wisconsin economist Anthony Lo Sasso. But he says it could be because most metro areas in the state have one dominant hospital and healthcare system.

For hospitals, “it’s not a monopoly market, but it’s a consolidated market,” Lo Sasso said in an interview.

Illinois metro areas appear to have more evenly matched competing healthcare systems — in Chicago, but also in smaller communities around the state, he suggested.

Lo Sasso said the consolidation in Wisconsin appears to give hospital systems more power to negotiate smaller discounts with health insurance plans.

Lo Sasso is based at the UW-Madison La Follette School of Public Affairs. The report was produced jointly with Capital Policy Analytics in Washington, D.C., and was released by the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at UW-Madison.

The report uses data hospitals and health insurers report to the federal government. Hospitals must report their charges for each service. Insurers must report the rates for each service that they’ve negotiated with hospital systems.

In both states, the report focuses on the rates paid by two health insurers, UnitedHealthcare and each state’s Blue Cross plan — Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, and in Wisconsin, Anthem Blue Cross. Both United and Blue Cross have a substantial group of fixed, negotiated rates in both states, the report found.

While Wisconsin has “a handful of large, vertically integrated systems with extensive control over physician supply, service lines, and affiliated health plans,” the report states, Illinois “maintains a more competitive landscape.”

The Illinois sample included 67 hospitals throughout the state, while Wisconsin’s consisted of 58 hospitals. The study compared the charges for services in 26 billing codes that were found in both  states.

“We use 26 high-volume procedures,” Lo Sasso said, that included heart surgery, maternity, orthopedic surgery and trauma procedures. He said the hospitals in the study were “highly representative of each state.”

The report states that Wisconsin hospitals’ 26% higher prices were consistent through a variety of analyses. In addition, at one hospital chain with operations in both Illinois and Wisconsin — Advocate Health, which is Advocate Aurora in Wisconsin — Wisconsin prices were 23% higher, the report found.

Christian Moran, senior vice president for finance and payment at the Wisconsin Hospital Association, said he didn’t believe the report adequately supported its conclusions.

The hospitals included were “not a representative sample,” accounting for less than half of all Wisconsin hospitals, he said.  He also took issue with the use of two dozen billing codes when there are more than 700 codes to choose from.

“I just don’t believe it’s appropriate to draw conclusions based on that sample and without looking at the broad array of things that are driving healthcare costs,” Moran said.

Wisconsin rail service to Chicago and the Pacific Northwest will share in a $140 million upgrade from the federal government.

The investment, awarded by the Federal Railroad Administration, will be used to overhaul 41 passenger locomotives that pull trains on the popular Hiawatha route connecting Milwaukee and Chicago and trains that pass through Wisconsin enroute to Washington state.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) announced the award Wednesday. The contract was a joint application involving the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and corresponding agencies in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon and Washington, all of which will also have passenger routes that will be served by the upgraded motive power.

“Investing in this rail line is an investment in the Main Streets that will get more customers, in families’ safety, and in our state’s future,” Baldwin said.

“This grant will help keep the locomotive fleet in a state of good repair, enhancing rail line resiliency, and preventing unplanned outages,” said Wisconsin DOT Secretary Kristina Boardman.

The funding came from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law enacted in the first year of former President Joe Biden’s term. Baldwin’s office noted that the law was enacted without the votes of any Wisconsin Republicans in Congress.

The prediction market platform Novig is suing to stop the state Department of Justice from using the state’s gambling laws to prevent the firm from operating in Wisconsin. 

Novig’s federal lawsuit follows DOJ’s lawsuits in April that charged three other prediction market platforms with violating Wisconsin’s recently adopted online sports gambling law. 

In the new lawsuit, filed by Novig’s parent firm Ludlow Exchange LLC, the business asserts that it isn’t engaged in “gambling” but instead is “providing sports-based event contracts to customers across the United States.”

Event contracts pay out to customers who purchase a contract for a specific outcome, such as victory by a particular team in a particular game. In the lawsuit Ludlow Exchange asserts that an event contract is a “derivative” investment regulated exclusively by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“The field here is not gambling,” the lawsuit states. “It is the regulation of trading on federally designated contract markets — the discrete activity over which Congress conferred exclusive jurisdiction” to the CFTC. 

DOJ communications director Riley Vetterkind referred a request for comment on the lawsuit to the department’s April 23 press release that announced its lawsuits against three other prediction market firms. 

“Thinly disguising unlawful conduct doesn’t make it lawful,” Attorney General Josh Kaul said then. “These companies’ alleged facilitation of sports betting in Wisconsin should be shut down.”

Novig entered the Wisconsin market the first week of August. Ludlow Exchange and Novig said in their lawsuit, which was first reported by WisPolitics, that they were filing the complaint because DOJ “could bring an enforcement action premised on the false notion that Novig is violating state gambling laws, exposing Novig to criminal liability for a Class I felony.”

The emergence of prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket has prompted states across the country to enact legislation and file lawsuits, Stateline reported in March.

The online platforms have been estimated to generate more than $13 billion every month, with the bulk of those revenues coming from sports betting, Stateline reported.

DOJ sued Kalshi, Coinbase, Polymarket and other prediction platforms in April, charging that their engagement in online sports betting violated the state’s online sports gambling law signed earlier that month. 

The new law legalized online sports betting in Wisconsin on the condition that the computer servers required are housed on tribal land. Until the law’s enactment, sports betting had been legal in Wisconsin since 2021, but only in person at tribal casinos.

The DOJ’s lawsuits said transactions on the prediction market platforms are “indistinguishable from an ordinary sports bet” as defined in Wisconsin law.

Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase and the other defendants in Wisconsin’s lawsuits have also asserted that they’re beyond the reach of state gambling bans. They contend they’re only subject to federal regulation by the CFTC, and that a federal appeals court has ruled states don’t have jurisdiction over prediction markets.

The defendants have moved Wisconsin’s cases into federal court, where lawyers are currently arguing over whether they should remain there or return to Dane County’s court. 

A vote that U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany cast in June 2025 has become a centerpiece of healthcare advocates’ criticism of the Republican candidate for governor.

Tiffany, along with all Republican members of Congress and no Democrats, joined in the passage of the 2025 HR 1 — the legislation that President Donald Trump and U.S. House Republican leaders dubbed “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”

The measure made cuts to Medicaid and federal nutrition benefits over the next 10 years, along with a range of other changes to federal programs. The Medicaid changes alone have been projected to cut $900 billion to $1 trillion from the health insurance plan for people with low incomes.

The legislation also extended a series of tax cuts that were passed in Trump’s first term — cuts that primarily benefit wealthy Americans, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

After the bill’s final passage in July 2025, Tiffany issued a statement praising the outcome for “providing tax cuts for seniors, parents, workers and small businesses” as well as for funding federal immigration agencies that have been deployed across the country.

Tiffany also said he would “remain committed to protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for our seniors and the most vulnerable, while rooting out waste and curbing the reckless spending that threatens future generations.”

But in press conferences last week and Tuesday, healthcare advocates said that bill was central to their opposition to Tiffany’s healthcare record.

“When he voted for the one big beautiful bill, he essentially voted for a $1.1 trillion cut in healthcare,” U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth) said at a press conference Tuesday organized by the groups Main Street Action and Protect Our Care. “And that’s the biggest cut we’ve ever seen in this country.”

In addition to benefit cuts, advocates have focused on what HR 1 lacked. U.S. House Democrats tried to persuade the Republican majority to extend enhanced health insurance subsidies for people buying their health coverage on the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

The enhanced subsidies were enacted in 2021 and expired at the end of 2025. Democrats’ repeated attempts to extend them were rejected, not only during debate on HR 1 but several times later in 2025 as well as early in 2026.

Pocan said he’s spoken with small business owners across his South Central Wisconsin district who have been affected by the ACA premium increases that resulted.

“We’ve seen small business owners in Baraboo on the Affordable Care Act say that their monthly portion they pay in has doubled or even tripled,” Pocan said. One constituent he spoke with “just got out of the [insurance] system altogether,” setting aside the cash that would have gone to an insurance premium in hopes that it would be enough to cover a healthcare emergency.

“That’s not a healthcare plan,” Pocan said. “That’s not about making health insurance more affordable. That’s about taking insurance away from people.”

According to a July 28 report from KFF, a nonprofit healthcare policy analysis and news organization, coverage through the ACA fell nationwide by 2.6 million in 2026 from 2025 after seven years of steady increases. In Wisconsin, coverage fell 16%, by 45,000 people.

Gov. Tony Evers issued a statement Tuesday blasting Wisconsin’s Republican congressional delegation for letting the enhanced subsidies expire. 

“Congressional Republicans’ refusal to extend the tax credits caused healthcare coverage costs to skyrocket, pricing families in Wisconsin and across the country out of having coverage at all,” Evers said.

Macy Buhler, a De Forest childcare provider and Main Street Action member who joined the press conference with Pocan, said that without those additional subsidies, the cost of insurance for some of her employees rose to unsustainable levels.

Buhler said she can’t cover healthcare for her childcare teachers directly, but has been providing them a stipend to help teachers who need health insurance purchase it on the federal ACA marketplace, HealthCare.gov. She doubled that stipend for 2026, she said — a $40,000 increase in just that expense.

“Early childhood teachers deserve real access to healthcare and medication, not a Congress who makes it impossible for them to afford both,” Buhler told reporters. “Tom Tiffany voted for this bill. We cannot trust him with our healthcare.”

Buhler told the Wisconsin Examiner that she’s “lost some staff and closed a classroom because they can no longer afford to be an early childhood educator, a teacher.”

Nancy Higgs, a self-employed interior designer specializing in affordable approaches for her customers, has been in business since 2023. The ACA coverage made it possible to get health coverage, she told the Wisconsin Examiner.

After a good first year, the business struggled following the 2024 election. Because her net income was too low, she switched to enroll in Medicaid — called BadgerCare in Wisconsin — for her healthcare.

Higgs said she isn’t sure what will happen to that coverage under the HR 1 changes, which don’t take effect until January 2027.

During a virtual news conference on Thursday, Aug. 13, Dr. Sophie Kramer, a Madison internal medicine physician, said the loss of insurance coverage, whether from Medicaid or an ACA policy, will lead to poorer health. The news conference was sponsored by the Committee to Protect Health Care.

“So much of what we do depends on patients having consistent access to healthcare. I treat patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer, heart disease, hypertension — and those don’t disappear when someone loses insurance, they just become harder to manage,” said Kramer. “I’ve seen too many patients suffer from treatable conditions simply because they didn’t have access to affordable care.”

Dr. Kristen Dall-Winther, another participant in that news conference, owns her own practice in Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District. Tiffany has been her U.S. representative since 2019.

“I see first hand what happens when patients struggle to afford care, when rural hospitals are under financial pressure, and when people put off seeing a doctor because they are worried about what it will cost,” Dall-Winther said. “Tom Tiffany has repeatedly voted for policies that make those problems worse.”

Dall-Winther cited forecasts that HR 1 could eventually cost more than 250,000 Wisconsin residents their healthcare coverage.

Kramer also cited Tiffany’s vote against a federal bill that would have codified a right to abortion in September 2021. The measure passed the House on a party-line vote but stalled in the U.S. Senate.  

Nine months later, in June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the nearly 50-year-old decision in Roe v. Wade that had legalized abortion nationwide. An 1849 Wisconsin statute that was interpreted as an abortion ban went into effect as a result.

“Tom Tiffany could have voted to protect that federal right to abortion in law, but he voted against it, allowing state bans like ours to interfere in personal medical decisions,” Kramer said.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the Wisconsin law didn’t apply to elective abortion.

The unions that won a circuit court ruling to overturn Wisconsin’s Act 10, the 2011 law stripping most public employees’ collective bargaining rights, are asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reinstate that ruling after an appeals court reversed the lower court.

The plaintiffs filed their state Supreme Court appeal Monday. They include unions affiliated with the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union and the Teamsters.

Act 10, one of the signature laws passed early in former Gov. Scott Walker’s two terms, ended collective bargaining rights for most state and local employees, making an exception for certain public safety employees. The law survived a series of court challenges in the years immediately after its passage.

In December 2024, however, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Jacob Frost ruled  that the law made an arbitrary distinction between the public safety employees who kept their union rights under Act 10 and other public safety employees who lost those rights.

State Capitol Police, University of Wisconsin Police, and state conservation wardens were “treated unequally with no rational basis for that difference” when they were denied collective bargaining, Frost ruled, and for that reason, Act 10 violated the Wisconsin Constitution’s equal protection clause.

The law remained in place pending appeals, and more than 18 months later, the 2nd District Court of Appeals overturned Frost’s ruling in a 2-1 decision July 29.

The Legislature’s reasoning for making the distinction wasn’t an issue, so long as there are “any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis for the classification,” Judges Mark Gundrum and Shelley Grogan wrote.

Judge Lisa Neubauer dissented, arguing that the unions that kept their bargaining rights had all supported Walker’s election in 2010 just months before he took office and signed Act 10 into law. Excluding them from the law while subjecting other public safety employees to its restrictions “is not based on any identified ‘substantial distinction’ that makes the first group really different from the other,” Neubauer wrote.

The new appeal quotes Neubauer’s dissent in arguing for the justices to take up the case.

“This Court should accept review and reaffirm that, as Judge Neubauer put it in her dissent, ‘rational-basis review is not a rubber stamp,’” the unions’ motion states. “Here, because Act 10’s classification between ‘public safety’ and ‘general’ employees cannot survive anything greater than rubber-stamp-level scrutiny, that classification violates Article I, Section 1 of the Wisconsin Constitution.”

The new appeal also challenges a finding from the appeals court majority, which found Wisconsin’s equal protection clause was identical to the federal equal protection clause and that a 2013 federal appeals court ruling had already found Act 10 constitutional.

A report earlier this week of a couple of measles cases in Southwest Wisconsin has turned into an outbreak, with 13 more confirmed cases and six probable cases of the viral illness, the state health department reported Thursday.

The outbreak, in Iowa and Lafayette counties, highlights the importance of getting vaccinated for measles, considered the safest and most effective way to prevent the spread of the virus, said Dr. Ryan Westergaard, the chief medical officer in the communicable disease bureau of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

The new group of measles patients who have been diagnosed are in Iowa County, Westergaard told reporters at a DHS briefing on the findings. Most of them were not vaccinated for measles, he said.

DHS announced two measles cases Tuesday, one in Iowa County and one in Lafayette County, that were confirmed through tests at the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene. 

Those were the third and fourth measles cases in Wisconsin in 2026, and were not related to the first two this year, which were linked to out-of-state travel.

Subsequent investigation by the local public health departments in the two counties turned up the 13 confirmed and six suspected cases that DHS announced Thursday. None of the current cases have been tied to travel. 

“The rapid emergence of these cases, particularly among people who have not traveled outside of Wisconsin, indicates that there is active local transmission, and it’s very likely that additional cases exist in the community that have not yet been identified or reported to public health,” Westergaard said.

State tracks 23 cases so far

Westergaard said DHS would not release the ages or age range for any of the people with confirmed measles cases in the current outbreak in order to protect their privacy.

The department maintains a state registry for all measles cases that includes age ranges and vaccination status. Thursday evening, that record showed that of the 23 confirmed or suspected cases identified in Wisconsin in 2026, three were in children age 4 or younger, 11 were in children ages 5 to 17, and nine were in adults ages 18 or older.

Westergaard said that it’s likely that there are more people with measles whose cases haven’t been identified and therefore aren’t on the state’s dashboard.

With one exception, the patients identified in 2026 were not vaccinated for the measles virus, according to DHS. One has been hospitalized.

Vaccine is ‘single best tool’ to stop outbreaks

DHS is asking people to verify whether they’ve had the MMR vaccine — the shot that includes protection against measles, mumps and rubella. That information is probably available from a person’s regular health provider, if they have one, or from the Wisconsin immunization registry.

The MMR vaccine is usually given in a two-shot sequence: the first dose when a child is 12 to 15 months old, and the second when the child is 4 to 6 years old.

“Having received two doses of MMR vaccine provides exceptional, long-lasting protection, and this vaccine remains our single best tool to stop this and future outbreaks,” Westergaard said.

For an adult without a record of the shot or who is uncertain about having had it, it is safe to get an additional shot, he said.  

DHS is also asking people to be familiar with measles symptoms. Westergaard said those include a high fever, a red rash that starts at the head and spreads down and covers the whole body, a cough, a runny nose and red or bloodshot eyes.

A person who develops those symptoms, or whose family member experiences them, should call their regular healthcare provider, Westergaard said.

People with the symptoms should call ahead before visiting a clinic, urgent care or the emergency room, he said, so that medical personnel can take precautions to prevent airborne spread of the virus before a patient arrives to protect other patients in the facility’s waiting room.

Easily spread virus

“Measles is known to be one of the most contagious viruses,” Westergaard said, “and we treat every case very seriously, because our goal is to completely stop measles transmission in the community anytime we have a case or a cluster of cases.”

Measles can cause serious health problems, according to DHS — pneumonia, deafness, and brain damage as a result of swelling from the disease.

Local public health agencies in the two counties haven’t identified specific public places where the virus might have spread, Westergaard said.

One of the jobs of local public health departments is to track contagious illnesses such as measles in their communities or counties, he said. DHS supports local agencies as they work to trace who else has been exposed to the virus.

Trump urges shift in childhood vaccine recommendations, calls for splitting up MMR vaccine

When a person who’s been exposed has been identified, they’re monitored for symptoms “to make sure that if any new cases pop up, we can get them isolated right away,” Westergaard said.

While the current outbreak is still small, “it’s a dynamic situation,” he added. With help from DHS, local health departments are tracing the spread of the virus and watching for more people who develop symptoms, “because that would be a sign that it’s getting larger.”

New Trump order ‘contradicts the best available science’

Thursday’s announcement follows an order Monday from President Donald Trump. Wisconsin’s top health official said Thursday that Trump’s order goes against the best scientific recommendations for measles prevention.

Trump’s order calls for separating the MMR vaccine into separate shots for each illness.

“There is no new scientific evidence that justifies changing recommendations that have, and continue to, protect children across the United States,” said Kirsten Johnson, secretary-designee of Wisconsin DHS, in a statement released Thursday.

“The executive order does not square at all with our recommendations on how to prevent measles or other vaccine-preventable diseases,” Westergaard said. “It was not science-based. It actually contradicts the best available science about how to prevent disease and keep kids healthy.”

DHS early this year turned from the Trump administration’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine recommendations after the agency cast aside previous longstanding vaccine guidance.

DHS instead has endorsed the childhood vaccine recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians.  

Westergaard said vaccinations in Wisconsin have fallen below the 95% rate that helps ensure widespread protection from illnesses that vaccines can prevent, and are even below 90%. That has happened for many complex reasons, he said — including misinformation, sometimes spread deliberately.

Wisconsin has so far avoided the “massive outbreaks” of measles that have occurred in states such as Utah, Texas and North Carolina, Westergaard said. Public health officials can contain the illness if they learn early of cases and are able to move quickly to identify and quarantine patients. But that’s more challenging because the state’s vaccination rate is lower than it should be, he said.

In addition to encouraging more vaccination, cooperation with public health measures is “a second layer of defense,” Westergaard said. “Let’s work together as a community, as a team, when an outbreak happens — be willing to share information, be willing to stay home when any symptoms happen, and allow us to identify the extent of an outbreak and to stop it.”