More people in the Metroplex may have been exposed to measles in recent days, as the total number of infections in the Texas outbreak rose to nearly 600 as of Friday, April 18.

Collin County health officials said someone who spent time in Plano on April 10 and 11 later tested positive for the highly contagious virus. If you were at any of these locations during the specified dates and are not vaccinated against measles or are unsure of your immunity, you may be at risk of contracting measles.

The person visited these locations:

Walmart, 6001 N. Central Expressway, Plano

• April 10, time unknown
• April 11, 9 p.m.
• April 12, 1 a.m.

Ross Dress For Less, 3300 N. Central Expressway, Plano

• April 11, 5-10 p.m.

Dollar Tree, 2404 K Ave., Plano

• April 11, in the evening

Symptoms can start to appear as long as 14 days after exposure. Individuals are infectious four days prior to and four days after rash onset.

Signs and symptoms of measles

Measles lives in the nose and throat, and it spreads through coughing and sneezing. You can get measles by breathing contaminated air or touching an infected surface.

Measles symptoms typically begin with:

• High fever
• Cough
• Runny nose
• Red, watery eyes (conjunctivitis)

2 or 3 days after measles symptoms begin:

Koplik spots, which are tiny white spots, might start appearing inside your mouth.

3 to 5 days after measles symptoms begin:

Now you start to see the measles rash, and fever may spike above 104 degrees. The rash often starts out as flat red spots on the face around the hairline. The rash spreads down to the neck, torso, arms, legs and feet. Small bumps may appear on top of the flat red spots. As the rash spreads, the spots can merge together from the head to the rest of the body.

On Tuesday, April 15, the Rockwall County Health Authority, east of Dallas, said someone who had traveled to West Texas had tested positive for measles. Rockwall County is not included in the state’s most recent list of cases confirmed to be part of the outbreak, published Friday morning. It may be that authorities haven’t confirmed whether the infection is part of the outbreak. Rockwall County had another measles case in February of an unvaccinated person who had recently traveled abroad.

In late March, someone with measles visited Grapevine. The window for symptoms to have started to appear in anyone who was exposed is closing this weekend. There have been no known infections from that exposure.

The Texas Department of State Health Services reported Friday that 36 more people have contracted measles since Tuesday, April 15, for a total of 597 confirmed cases.

Sixty-two of the patients have been hospitalized since January. Two school-age children in Texas have died. They were not vaccinated.

The outbreak began in the South Plains region of western Texas and has largely been contained there, but there’s a high risk of measles spreading elsewhere, especially in counties where vaccination rates among children are below 95%.

A Star-Telegram analysis of vaccination data, published in the fall, showed that one in three Fort Worth-area schools were at risk for a measles outbreak due to low vaccination rates, especially in the Fort Worth Independent School District.

A 95% vaccination rate is considered sufficient to reach herd immunity, which is important to protect infants who are too young to receive the vaccine and immunocompromised people.

Severe complications from measles

This story was originally published April 18, 2025 at 10:27 AM with the headline "More people in North Texas were exposed to measles at Walmart, Ross and Dollar Tree."

Matt Leclercq

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Matt Leclercq is senior managing editor at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He previously was an editor at USA Today in Washington, national news editor at Gatehouse Media in Austin, and executive editor of The Fayetteville (NC) Observer. He’s a New Orleans native.