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Measles in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of measles news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about measles, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API.
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Key findings
Measles took an 83.1% smaller share of the articles in the Prism news index in 2020 than in 2019 (1.19 against 7.05 articles per 10,000 news articles), and its share stayed below 1 per 10,000 in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Basis: Annual measles articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, 2019–2025.
April 2019 was the month in which measles took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 17.62 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly measles articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Measles coverage rose from 0.97 articles per 10,000 news articles in 2023 to 3.45 in 2025, a 3.56-fold increase in share, though the 2025 level was still 51.1% below the 2019 level of 7.05.
Basis: Annual measles articles per 10,000 articles in the index; 2026 (January–July) is partial and excluded.
March 2025, the month of the outbreak in western Texas and New Mexico, had the highest monthly share of measles news after 2019, at 7.2 articles per 10,000 news articles, and the most measles articles of any month between January 2019 and July 2026 (1,790).
Basis: Monthly measles articles and all articles in the index.
In a global news index, an average of 43.26% of each year's measles coverage was published from January to April, against 29.24% in the five months from June to October.
Basis: Within-year month shares of measles articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 7,257 | 64.01% | 1.32 |
| United Kingdom | 609 | 5.37% | 0.92 |
| Canada | 458 | 4.04% | 1.88 |
| New Zealand | 426 | 3.76% | 5.81 |
| Australia | 375 | 3.31% | 1.54 |
| India | 331 | 2.92% | 0.22 |
| Bangladesh | 239 | 2.11% | 8.14 |
| Brazil | 143 | 1.26% | 1.46 |
| Nigeria | 136 | 1.2% | 0.88 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "measles" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Measles in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/measles/