Skip to main content

Measles cases rise 30 percent worldwide: UN

Measles cases worldwide jumped more than 30 percent last year compared to 2016, with increases recorded in wealthy European countries like Germany where vaccination coverage has historically been high, the UN said Thursday.

The World Health Organization said the worrying trend of resurgent measles cases was a near global phenomenon, but the causes varied among regions.

In Europe, experts blamed the problem in part on complacency and misinformation about a vaccine proven to be both effective and safe.

Martin Friede, WHO’s director of immunization, vaccines and biological told reporters that “supposed experts making accusations against the vaccine without any evidence” has had an impact on parents’ decisions.

He specifically cited medically baseless claims linking the measles vaccine to autism, which have been spread in part on social media by members of the so-called “anti-vax” movement.

But cases have also spiked in Latin America, partly due to “a collapsing health system in Venezuela,” the head of the vaccine alliance Gavi, Seth Berkley, said in a statement.

A crippling political and economic crisis in Venezuela has triggered massive inflation, with hospitals struggling to maintain stocks.

“What is more worrying than the increase in the cases reported is that we are seeing sustained measles transmission in countries that had previously not seen measles transmission for many years,” Friede said.

“This suggests we are actually regressing.”

Multiple countries — notably Germany, Russia and Venezuela — have had their measles elimination certificate withdrawn over the last 12 months.

A country loses its measles elimination status when “the same type of virus has been circulating for more than 12 continuous months,” according to WHO.

WHO stressed that the overall global fight against measles had shown impressive results this century. In 2000, there were more than 850,000 cases reported worldwide, compared to 173,000 last year.

That progress made the recent setbacks all the more frustrating, said WHO immunization expert Ann Lindstrand.

“We have a safe and effective vaccine,” she told reporters. “This is not rocket science, we know what to do.”

According to WHO guidelines, preventing measles outbreaks requires 95 percent coverage of the first dose of the vaccine.

Global coverage has stalled at 85 percent for several years, but the figure is lower in poorer regions like Africa, which had a coverage rate of 70 percent in 2017.

Measles is a highly contagious disease, which can cause severe diarrhea, pneumonia and vision loss and can be fatal in some cases.

The post Measles cases rise 30 percent worldwide: UN appeared first on ARYNEWS.



from ARYNEWS https://ift.tt/2rbQaPJ

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Trump says he urged team to ‘slow’ COVID-19 testing

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he was encouraging health officials in his administration to slow down coronavirus testing, arguing that increased tests lead to more cases being discovered. The president has claimed falsely on several occasions that surges of COVID-19 in several states can be explained by greater numbers of diagnostic tests. At his first rally since the outbreak forced nationwide shutdowns in March, Trump told the crowd in Tulsa, Oklahoma that testing was a “double-edged sword.” The United States — which has more deaths and cases than any other country — has carried out more than 25 million coronavirus tests, placing it outside the top 20 countries in the world, per capita. “Here is the bad part: When you do testing to that extent, you are going to find more people, you will find more cases,” Trump argued. “So I said to my people ‘slow the testing down.’ They test and they test.” It was not clear from Trump’s tone if he was playing to the crowd, who ...

Sir Anwer Pervez, richest Pakistani British businessman, loses £432m in pandemic

Sir Anwar Pervez OBE, the founder and chairman of Bestway Cash & Carry has lost £432 million during the coronavirus pandemic to bring him down to No 50 on the richest British people list. The list has 1,000 people and is published by the Sunday Times newspaper . Pervez was at No 42 previously.  The 2020 list of the UK’s richest shows its first fall in wealth in a decade as Britain’s wealthiest people lost tens of billions of pounds in the coronavirus pandemic, the Sunday Times reported in its Rich List 2020. The newspaper, which has produced the respected annual ranking of the country’s 1,000 wealthiest people since 1989, found the past two months had resulted in the super-rich losing £54 billion ($65 billion). More than half of the billionaires in Britain had seen drops in their worth by as much as £6b, a decrease in their collective wealth unprecedented since 2009 and the financial crisis. The Hinduja brothers, who topped last year’s list with a £22b fortune, saw among ...

Despite reservations about jury, Pakistan to implement FATF reforms: envoy

WASHINGTON: Despite its reservations about the fairness of the jury which is to determine Pakistan’s performance against terror financing, the government is committed to implementing its action plan for dealing with this issue, says Islamabad’s Washington envoy Asad Majeed Khan. In a conversation with a prominent US scholar George Perkovich, recorded at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on Monday afternoon, Ambassador Khan said the actions that Pakistan had taken so far to eliminate terror financing were “reflective of the political will”. “We feel that we have done a lot. We are also clear and determined to do more,” said the envoy while responding to a question about a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) held in Orlando last week, which asked Pakistan to implement its own action plan for eliminating terror financing by October. Failing to do so could put Pakistan on a blacklist of violators and bring strict economic sanctions too. “But we w...