One of the most famous charts in public health, rebuilt from the source data: US measles by state, 1928–2003. A single vertical line marks 1963 — and the colour just collapses. Then a second view on why measles is back.
Sources: Project Tycho, University of Pittsburgh — US weekly notifiable-disease reports, measles incidence per 100,000 by state, 1928–2003 (annualized here); global cases and MCV1 coverage from the WHO via Our World in Data, retrieved Aug 2026 · the heatmap uses a square-root colour scale so lower-incidence cells stay visible · tip: hover any cell for the exact figure; switch views above.
A first-draft write-up — the data and charts are real; the words are a starting point to make your own.
Some datasets argue; this one just shows. Each row is a US state, each column a year, and the colour is how many people per 100,000 caught measles. For thirty-five years the grid burns — bright bands every couple of years as the disease swept through in epidemic waves. Then you reach 1963, the vaccine line, and within a few columns the whole grid goes dark.
You could make the same point with a single national line chart, and it would be true but forgettable. The heatmap does something a line can't: it shows that the collapse happened everywhere, at once. Every state, regardless of size or geography, went dark in the same few years. That simultaneity is the fingerprint of a cause acting on all of them together — and it's visible without a single statistical test.
A note on the colour: measles was so common before the vaccine that a raw scale would wash everything else out. The square-root scale keeps the low-incidence years and states readable, so you can see texture in the post-vaccine era too.
The pre-vaccine grid isn't a story about bad years. It's what "endemic" looks like — a disease that simply came back, in waves, forever, until it didn't.
The second view is the same US grid for 2003 to 2022 — the era after measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000 — with the colour scale rescaled for a far smaller range (the brightest cell here is about 5 per 100,000, versus nearly 3,000 in the pre-vaccine chart). Now the grid is almost entirely dark: elimination. But it isn't spotless. The bright band in New York in 2019 is a real outbreak in undervaccinated communities, and 2014 flickers too. These are the cracks — measles doesn't return everywhere at once anymore; it returns wherever coverage has slipped.
An honest note on the dates: this clean state-by-state series ends in 2022. It does not yet include 2025, when the US recorded its largest measles year since elimination (over 2,000 cases). That surge lives in provisional weekly data that isn't cleanly resolved by state yet — so rather than fake the precision, this view stops where the trustworthy data does. The global view below carries the recent-resurgence story.
Switch to Global resurgence. As worldwide first-dose coverage climbed from 16% in 1980 toward the mid-80s, reported cases fell by orders of magnitude — the red area drops as the blue line rises. The two are reading the same story from opposite ends.
Then watch the last few years. Coverage stalled and slipped after 2019 — pandemic disruption to routine immunization — and cases have surged back: global reported cases roughly tripled from 2022 to 2023. Measles is unforgiving of gaps because it's so contagious; it needs very high coverage (~95%) to stay suppressed, and it finds the pockets where coverage falls short.
The global total hides who. The third view is a heatmap of the same idea as the first — country by year — but rescaled for these numbers with a logarithmic colour scale, since reported cases run from near zero to over a million in a single country-year. It shows the burden isn't evenly spread: a handful of countries carry most of it, and the recent bright bands mark where outbreaks are flaring now. Same visual grammar as the US chart; a scale fit to a very different range.
Surveillance data, vaccine studies, outbreak analysis — turning messy public-health data into something clear and defensible is exactly my wheelhouse.