Measles is an old scourge, one of the world’s most contagious diseases, which was already described in detail by doctors under the Caliph in Baghdad, around 1,300 years ago. Their contemporary colleagues are still fighting the disease, although enormous progress has been made, primarily the development of an extremely effective vaccine in the early 1960s and since then a large international vaccine program. The spread of the vaccine means that an estimated 56 million lives have been saved worldwide between 2000 and 2021 alone. This is shown by the latest figures from the World Health Organization WHO. – It is one of the most effective health efforts in the world, says Peter Henrik Andersen, who is a ward doctor in the department of infection epidemiology and prevention at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, among other things he is also responsible for monitoring measles in Denmark. But the corona pandemic has meant that millions of planned vaccines have been postponed and cancelled. A banal killer Measles is an incredibly contagious disease, which infects nine out of ten people who are exposed to it if they have not acquired immunity through vaccination. The disease cannot be cured and is particularly dangerous for children under the age of five in developing countries. – For the vast majority of people, measles is a disease from which you get sick, lie in bed for a week and get well again. But sometimes there are complications to the disease, most often bacterial infections that come in addition. These are really banal conditions, which can be easily treated in Denmark, but in other countries it can end up with children dying from the infection, explains Peter Henrik Andersen. At the same time, you can risk blindness, and the disease affects the immune system for a long period afterwards, he says. Before vaccines were rolled out worldwide, measles claimed the lives of more than two million people annually. But the vaccine programs are now so extensive that the death toll in 2021 had fallen to 128,000. Vaccines save millions Because measles is so extremely contagious, it means that 95 percent of the population must be vaccinated to achieve herd protection. It requires two doses of vaccine to be given to children. The vaccine also protects against rubella and mumps. Worldwide, the proportion of those vaccinated with at least one dose of vaccine rose to 86 per cent in 2019. But the corona pandemic has disrupted and slowed down efforts tremendously, and figures from the WHO show that this led to the proportion falling to 81 per cent in 2021. Peter Henrik Andersen explains that the struggle In short, the fight against corona has taken away the strength from the existing vaccination programmes, and globally it has resulted in the biggest drop in childhood vaccinations in 30 years. – It has required a huge effort to fight the coronavirus for most countries, he says. – At the same time, new children are born all the time and lose the possible innate protection from the mother during the first six months. The more of them there are, the larger the group that can become ill if they are exposed to measles, and the risk of an outbreak increases. In 2021, almost 25 million infants lacked just a single vaccine, data from the WHO shows. It is particularly on the African continent that the vaccination rate is lagging. – Therefore, there is a need for follow-up vaccination campaigns that can make up for the fall, says Peter Henrik Andersen. As in Denmark, after that there was a minor drop in vaccinations in 2020. So far, 25 large vaccination campaigns, which were postponed during the corona pandemic, have been carried out.
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