Measles cases rising around the world
There has been a rapid increase in the global measles outbreak, with reported cases jumping 300 percent in the first three months of 2019 compared with the same period last year, according to the World Health Organization.
As reasons for the increase, the organization has cited a deep mistrust of vaccines, gaps in immunization coverage and lack of access to health care facilities or routine checkups.
This month, the WHO sounded the alarm over the disease’s grip on the Democratic Republic of Congo, where nearly 5,000 people with measles died in the first 10 months of this year.
The highly contagious disease is caused by a virus and typically begins with a high fever and rash that can lead to complications of deafness, pneumonia, diarrhea and encephalitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And although measles has become largely preventable through vaccines administered during childhood, the WHO estimated that 110,000 people, most of them children younger than 5 and living in developing countries in Africa and Asia, succumbed to it in 2017.
Here are some of the countries that have detected a large number of measles cases.
The world’s biggest measles epidemic is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with more than 233,000 people infected this year alone, the WHO estimated. A total of 4,723 people died of it from January through October as the disease spread to all 26 provinces in the country.
The measles outbreak has gripped Congo even as it grapples with the Ebola epidemic, which has killed nearly 2,200 people.
Local and global health officials are undertaking tremendous efforts to contain both diseases amid political instability and insecurity. Yet even Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of WHO, has conceded that measles has received “little international attention” even though it has proved deadlier than Ebola.
Over 1,200 measles cases were confirmed in 31 states in 2019 as of early November, with a majority of the new cases appearing in New York. The outbreak constitutes the greatest number of cases reported in the United States since 1992, according to the CDC. More than 120 people have been hospitalized from measles this year.