How one county scrambled to keep America measles-free

FILE PHOTO: A measles poster is seen at Venice Family Clinic in Los Angeles, California February 5, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/File Photo

NEW YORK (Reuters) - In Rockland County, New York, a wooded suburb 30 miles north of Manhattan, a teenage boy lay in a room in an empty wing of a health clinic, in a fetal position, coughing.

It was October 2018. The boy had measles, which spreads through the air. His illness was the dawn of the worst outbreak in the United States for more than a quarter century, and the start of a multi-million-dollar effort by an understaffed health department to contain it.