Author: Aimee Cunningham / Source: Science News
From 2016 to 2017, the number of reported cases in the region jumped 6,358 percent, to 775, largely fueled by an ongoing outbreak in Venezuela that has since infected thousands more. Along with a spike in measles in Europe, the Venezuela outbreak contributed to a 31 percent worldwide increase in reports of the highly contagious disease in 2017, according to researchers from the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Both the Americas and the European regions have the resources to stop measles, and it’s not happening,” says William Moss, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who was not involved with the report.
The apparent jump comes after years of steady progress toward reducing the spread of the disease. Even taking the recent rise into account, reported measles cases from 2000 to 2017 have dropped 80 percent worldwide — from 853,479 to 173,330 — as have estimated deaths from the disease, researchers say in the Nov. 30 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Measles vaccination prevented an estimated 21.1 million deaths over that time, the report says, though it continues to be a leading cause of vaccine-preventable infant deaths globally.
“Global efforts to eliminate measles continue to make progress,” says Rebecca Martin, director of CDC’s Center for Global Health in Atlanta. “Despite these gains, multiple regions have experienced large measles outbreaks in 2017, primarily due to low vaccination coverage nationally or in geographic pockets, illustrating how fragile gains in disease elimination can be.”
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