Vitamin A overdoses rose by 38.7% in 2025: How do you get the right amount?

According to America’s Poison Centers , between January 1 and March 31, 2025, there were 86 cases of “vitamin A exposures,” referring to overdoses of vitamin A , among children. This, they note, represents “a 38.7% increase compared to the same period in 2024.” The figures are striking, particularly in relation to a dietary supplement that generally ought to be harmless.

So what happened? A team of researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, Harvard Medical School, the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Department of Public Health at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, have a hypothesis.

In a public health research letter recently published in JAMA Network Open , they draw a link between the abrupt year-on-year hike in vitamin A exposures and the measles — a viral disease — outbreak in 2025, which corresponds to the period during which America’s Poison Centers recorded the increase in cases.