Just 10 countries were responsible for three-quarters of a global surge in measles cases last year, the UN children’s agency said on Friday, including one of the world’s richest nations, France.
Ninety-eight countries reported more cases of measles compared with 2017, and the world body warned that conflict, complacency and the growing anti-vaccine movement threatened to undo decades of work to tame the disease.
“This is a wake-up call. We have a safe, effective and inexpensive vaccine against a highly contagious disease — a vaccine that saved almost a million lives every year over the last two decades,” UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Executive Director Henrietta Fore said. “These cases haven’t happened overnight. Just as the serious outbreaks we are seeing today took hold in 2018, lack of action today will have disastrous consequences for children tomorrow.”
Measles is more contagious than tuberculosis or Ebola, yet it is eminently preventable with a vaccine that costs pennies.
However, the WHO last year said that cases worldwide had soared nearly 50 percent, killing about 136,000 people.
Ukraine, the Philippines and Brazil saw the largest year-on-year increases.
In Ukraine alone there were 35,120 cases — nearly 30,000 more than in 2017. Brazil saw 10,262 cases last year after having none at all the year before, while the Philippines reported 15,599 cases, compared with 2,407 in 2017.
Taken together, the 10 nations accounting for 75 percent of the increase from 2017 to last year account for only one-10th of the global population.
The countries with the highest rate of measles last year were Ukraine (822 cases per million people), Serbia (618), Albania (481), Liberia (412), Georgia (398), Yemen (328), Montenegro (323) and Greece (227).
While most of the countries that experienced large spikes in cases are beset by unrest or conflict, France saw its caseload jump by 2,269.
In the US, there was a 559 percent year-on-year increase in cases from 120 to 791.
The resurgence of the disease in some countries has been linked to medically baseless claims linking the measles vaccine to autism, which have been spread in part on social media by members of the so-called “anti-vax” movement.
The WHO last month listed “vaccine hesitancy” among the top 10 most pressing global health threats for this year.
“Almost all of these cases are preventable and yet children are getting infected even in places where there is simply no excuse,” Fore said. “Measles may be the disease, but all too often the real infection is misinformation, mistrust and complacency.”
In war-torn Yemen, where health services in many regions have collapsed, UNICEF and the WHO last month joined local authorities in a campaign to vaccinate about 13 million children aged six months to 15 for measles and rubella.
UN officials said that 92 percent of the targeted children were vaccinated during the one-week push, which ended on Feb. 14.
Yemen also figured on UNICEF’s “top 10” list of countries showing the largest increases last year in measles cases with a 316 percent hike, from 2,101 cases in 2017 to 8,742 cases last year.
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