PARIS: Vaccination against measles should be mandatory for children before they start school in order to prevent future outbreaks of the resurgent disease, according to new analysis released on Friday.
The World Health Organization says cases of measles — a highly contagious viral infection that causes rashes and fever that can prove fatal — surged 300 per cent in 2018.
While many new cases occurred in countries undergoing unrest or conflict, several developed nations registered significant rises in infections — a phenomenon experts attribute to creeping “vaccine resistance”.
Despite a widely effective, almost universally available vaccine costing pennies, more and more parents are willingly putting their children in harm’s way due in part to a fraudulent scientific paper published over 20 years ago that subsequently fed conspiracy theories about plots to spread the disease.
Filippo Trentini and colleagues from the Bruno Kessler Foundation looked at seven rich nations and used computer modelling to examine several different vaccination scenarios between now and 2050.
They found that in nearly all countries surveyed, current immunisation programmes will be insufficient to maintain “safe” levels of immunity among populations.
The WHO says the number of unvaccinated individuals in a given country should not exceed 6-8 per cent of the population in order to avoid widespread outbreaks.
“This is a complex phenomenon and it may have various causes depending on the region,” Trentini told journalists.
“In high-income countries, for example, it may be attributable to vaccine resistance and to the clustering of unvaccinated people in specific groups of the population.” — AFP
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