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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Millions of children miss measles shots, creating outbreaks

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LONDON: 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, a UN report said on Thursday.


“The measles virus will always find unvaccinated children,” said Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF, adding: “The ground for the global measles outbreaks we are witnessing today was laid years ago.” The UNICEF report said an estimated 169 million children missed out on the first dose of the measles vaccine between 2010 and 2017 — equating to 21.1 million children a year on average.


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


In 2017, some 110,000 people, most of them children, died from measles, 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, including in the US, Europe, the Philippines, Tunisia and Thailand.


Among high-income countries, the US — which 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. Next came France and Britain, with more than 600,000 and 500,000 unvaccinated children, respectively, during the same period.


— Reuters


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