Most of these cases are in children who were not fully vaccinated. Vaccine hesitancy is believed to be a major reason why children are missing out on important vaccinations – the World Health Organization has described this as One of the 10 major threats to global health in 2019. And if we are seeing more cases of measles now, we can soon expect to see more cases of other vaccine-preventable infections, including some that can cause liver cancer or meningitis.
Some people will always argue that measles is no big deal– That infections used to be common, and that most people survived them and recovered. It is true that in most cases children recover from the virus. but not always.
Symptoms of measles begin with fever and runny nose. Telltale rashes come later. In some cases, serious complications develop. They can include pneumonia, blindness and brain swelling. Some people will not develop complications until years later. In rare cases, the disease can be fatal.
Before the introduction of the measles vaccine, in 1963, measles epidemics occurred every two to three years, According to WHO. At the time, about 2.6 million people died from measles each year. Since its introduction, the measles vaccine is believed to have prevented approximately 59 million deaths.
But the vaccination rate has been slow, says Anne Zink, an emergency medicine physician and clinical fellow at the Yale School of Public Health. “We have seen a slow decline in the number of people willing to get vaccinated against measles for some time,” she says. “As we get more and more people who are at risk because they have not been vaccinated, the greater the chance that the disease will spread and spread.”
