The World Health Organisation on Tuesday raised the alarm over the rapid spread of measles.
This followed more than 306,000 cases reported worldwide last year, constituting a 79 percent increase from 2022.
According to the WHO technical adviser on measles and rubella, Natasha Crowcroft, measles cases are typically dramatically under-reported, and that the real number was surely far higher.
Crowfort said: “We in the measles world are extremely concerned.”
Measles are a highly contagious, serious airborne disease caused by a virus that can lead to severe complications and death.
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It majorly affects children.
To get more accurate figures, the UN health agency models the numbers each year, with its latest estimate indicating that there were 9.2 million cases and 136,216 measles deaths in 2022.
Such modelling has not yet been done for last year, but Crowcroft pointed out that 2022 had already seen a 43-percent jump in deaths from the year before.
Given the soaring case numbers, she told journalists in Geneva, via video link from Cairo, Egypt: “We would anticipate an increase in deaths in 2023 as well.”
Crowfort warned that more than half of all countries globally are currently believed to be at high risk of measles outbreaks by the end of the year.
The WHO Technical Adviser said a major cause of the swelling numbers is the “backsliding immunisation coverage”.
At least 95 percent of children need to be fully vaccinated against the disease in a locality to prevent outbreaks, but global vaccination rates have slipped to 83 percent.
Reportedly, there is a great deal of inequity in the distribution of cases, and even more so when it comes to deaths.
According to Crowcroft, 92 percent of all children who die from measles live among less than a quarter of the global population, mainly in very low-income countries.