A Resurgence of Measles Killed More Than 200,000 People Last Year: Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a harrowing report, stating that deaths caused by measles are up nearly 50 percent since 2016, reports Aimee Cunningham for Science News.
Despite there being a highly effective vaccine, measles—an airborne virus that attacks the respiratory system in children—caused 207,500 deaths in 2019. In total, 869,770 cases were reported last year, the highest numbers seen in nearly 25 years, reports Thomas Mulier for Bloomberg.
"This is a really important setback and a tragic setback, because we’ve had a safe and effective measles vaccine since the early 1960s," William Moss, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, tells Science News. "We had made enormous progress."
Nearly three quarters of worldwide cases occurred in nine countries that experienced widespread outbreaks among children: Georgia, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, North Macedonia, Samoa, Tonga and Ukraine, according to the report.
