20M children globally miss measles vaccines

US reports highest cases since 2000 as widespread anti-vax movement surges

More than 20 million children a year missed out on measles vaccines across the world in the past eight years, laying a path of exposure to a virus that is now causing disease outbreaks globally, Reuters reported, citing a United Nations report on Thursday.

"The measles virus will always find unvaccinated children," said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the UN children's agency, UNICEF, adding: "The ground for the global measles outbreaks we are witnessing today was laid years ago."

The report said an estimated 169 million children missed out on the first dose of the measles vaccine between 2010 and 2017. That equates to an average of 21.1 million children.

As a result of greater vulnerability to the disease, measles infections worldwide nearly quadrupled in the first quarter of 2019 against the same period in 2018 to 112,163 cases, according to World Health Organization data.

In 2017, nearly 110,000 people, most of them children, died from measles. That was up 22 percent from the year before, UNICEF said.

Measles is a highly contagious disease that can kill and can cause blindness, deafness or brain damage. It is currently spreading in outbreaks in many parts of the world.

Two doses of the measles vaccine are essential to protect children and the WHO says 95 percent vaccine coverage is needed for "herd immunity" against measles.

But due to lack of access, poor health systems, complacency and, in some cases, fear or skepticism about vaccines, UNICEF said the global coverage of the first dose of the measles vaccine was reported to be 85 percent in 2017. That level has remained constant for the past decade. Global coverage for the second dose is even lower, at 67 percent.

In both rich, poor nations

Worldwide, measles cases rose 300 percent through the first three months of 2019 compared with the same period last year, according to the UN.

Among high-income countries, the United States, currently is fighting its biggest measles outbreak in almost 20 years, topped UNICEF's list of places with the most children missing the first dose of the vaccine between 2010 and 2017, at more than 2.5 million.

The US has recorded 695 cases of measles so far this year, the most of any year since the disease was declared eliminated at the turn of the century, officials said on Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported.

The new tally of US cases confirmed by US authorities surpassed the previous high of 667 reached in 2014.

Resurgence of the once-eradicated, highly-contagious disease is linked to the growing anti-vaccine movement in richer nations, which the WHO has identified as a major global health threat.

The so-called anti-vax, or anti-vaxxer phenomenon, has adherents across Western countries but is particularly high profile in the US, where it has been fueled by medically baseless claims spread on social media.

"The high number of cases in 2019 is primarily the result of a few large outbreaks - one in Washington state and two large outbreaks in New York that started in late 2018," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said in a statement.

Next came France and Britain, with more than 600,000 and 500,000 unvaccinated children, respectively, during the same period since 2000.

In poorer countries, however, the situation is "critical", UNICEF's report found. The UN agency put declining coverage down to lack of access, poor health systems, complacency, and in some cases fear or skepticism over immunization, Agence France-Presse reported.

Fore said measles was "far too contagious" a disease to be ignored, and urged health officials to do more to fight it.

"If we are serious about averting the spread of this dangerous but preventable disease, we need to vaccinate every child, in rich and poor countries alike," she said.

(China Daily 04/26/2019 page19)