UNICEF warns missed vaccinations causing global measles outbreaks
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The United Nations has warned, that more than 20 million children a year missed out on measles vaccines across the world in the past eight years, leading to the global measles outbreak we are seeing today.
A UNICEF report said an estimated 169 million children missed out on the first dose of the measles vaccine between 2010 and 2017 – equating to 21.1 million children a year on average.
As a result of greater vulnerability to the disease, the measles infections worldwide nearly quadrupled in the first quarter of 2019 against the same period in 2018 to 112,163 cases, according to World Health Organization data.
Henrietta Fore, executive director of the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF, said the global measles outbreaks the world is witnessing today was laid years ago as a result of unvaccinated children.
In 2017, some 110,000 people, most of them children, died from measles – up 22% from the year before, UNICEF said.
Measles is currently spreading in outbreaks in many parts of the world, including in the United States, Europe, the Philippines, Tunisia and Thailand.
Among high-income countries, the United States – which currently is fighting its biggest measles outbreak in almost 20 years – topped UNICEF’s list of places with the most children missing the first dose of the vaccine between 2010 and 2017, at more than 2.5 million.
Next came France and Britain, with more than 600,000 and 500,000 unvaccinated children, respectively, during the same period.
In poorer countries, however, the situation is “critical”, UNICEF’s report found. Nigeria in 2017, for example, had the highest number of children under one year old who missed out on the first dose, at nearly 4 million. It was followed by India, with 2.9 million, Pakistan and Indonesia, with 1.2 million each, and Ethiopia, with 1.1 million.
