Measles may have spread at a Noah’s Ark-themed creationist museum in Kentucky earlier this week, the state’s health authority said.
Visitors and staff at Ark Encounter in Williamstown are being encouraged to be on the alert for symptoms of the highly contagious—and vaccine-preventable—disease through Jan. 19, the Kentucky Department of Public Health explained, following a potential exposure on Monday.
“An unvaccinated, out-of-state traveler stayed at the Holiday Inn & Suites in Dry Ridge from Dec. 28 to 30, 2025 and visited the Ark Encounter on Dec. 29, 2025,” the agency said in a Facebook post. It then noted that “vaccination is the best protection against measles,” and that young, unvaccinated children are particularly at risk of developing complications.
Answers in Genesis, the young Earth creationist group that operates the venue and a second creationist museum in Kentucky, told the Daily Beast that the state health department informed them that a child visitor had contracted measles.
“For guests who gave us their email address when they purchased tickets for that day, we shared—in an email message coordinated with health officials—that if visitors were fully vaccinated, no action would be needed," co-founder Mark Looy said in a statement. “For unvaccinated guests in attendance on Monday, the email requested that they promptly contact their personal physician for guidance, indicating that measles can be contagious before symptoms appear. That same information was shared with Ark staff. 775 emails were sent to guest families who visited [on] Monday.”
Looy added: “We pray that the child affected is doing well. We have not heard of reports that other guests have contracted measles.”
Ark Encounter, which includes exhibits showing dinosaurs and humans living together, allows children 10 years old and under to enter for free. It reported 1 million visitors from mid-2017 to mid-2018, its second year of operation.
Measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but has made a comeback amid vaccine skepticism under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy, 71, has baselessly claimed that herd immunity is more effective than vaccines. Since he took office, major measles outbreaks have occurred in Texas in March and in South Carolina last month, among other locations.
In Texas, the outbreak began in a county where 1 in 4 residents had not been vaccinated against the disease. At least two unvaccinated children died.
At least 49 other U.S. outbreaks occurred last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2024, there were 16.
By the end of 2025, the U.S. had reported more than 2,000 measles cases for the first time since 1992, the CDC said. Eleven percent of patients were hospitalized, half of them under 19 years old.
In Florida last September, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis axed the state’s measles vaccine mandate for children in school. He did the same with mumps and chickenpox vaccines.
