LONDON -- Nearly 170 million children worldwide, including more than 2.5 million in the United States and half a million in Britain, missed out on the first dose of the measles vaccine during the past eight years, opening the door to global outbreaks of the disease, a UNICEF report said on Thursday.
"The ground for the global measles outbreaks we are witnessing today was laid years ago," Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, said in a statement.
"The measles virus will always find unvaccinated children," she added.
UNICEF cited a lack of access to the vaccine, poor health care, complacency, and fear or skepticism about vaccines in general as reasons for the disturbing trend.
The rise of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States and the rest of the world may be linked to the vaccine rejection, which Simon Stevens, the director of Britain's National Health Service, called "a serious and growing public health time bomb."
The rejection has been encouraged by the spread of false information, often on social media platforms, about supposed links between vaccines and autism, a theory roundly rejected by scientists and doctors.
Measles, a highly infectious viral disease that is more contagious than Ebola or tuberculosis, is still an important cause of death among young children globally, the World Health Organization said.
More than 365 children die from measles every day, according to UNICEF, and the disease can cause blindness, deafness or brain damage.
Two doses of the same combined vaccine -- for measles, mumps and rubella -- are required to protect children from the disease. For a whole community to be safe, including babies and others who have yet to be vaccinated -- so-called herd immunity -- 95 percent immunization coverage is required. But global coverage is much lower: In 2017, worldwide coverage was reported at 85 percent for the first dose and 67 percent for the second, UNICEF said.
Nearly 169 million children worldwide missed out on the first dose, with an average of more than 21 million children missing out every year from 2010 to 2017. More than 2.5 million children in the United States, and more than half a million children in France and Britain, did not get the first measles vaccine dose between 2010 and 2017.
Britain eliminated measles in 2016, the government said. But though the disease is no longer native to the country, Britain has experienced recent measles outbreaks, and immunity levels among mostly young people remain lower than required.
Outbreaks of the disease have been reported in British cities such as Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham and Surrey since October 2017, according to the National Health Service. But Manchester appears to be a focal point of the disease in the country, with 47 cases of measles there since the start of the year, the Public Health England agency said last week. Last year, the city had three cases total, the BBC reported.
The United States had reports of 695 cases of measles this year -- the highest annual number recorded since the disease was eradicated in the country in 2000 -- federal health officials said Wednesday.
UNICEF warned in March that measles has been surging globally: Countries with no reported cases of measles in 2017 experienced outbreaks of hundreds of cases last year.
Brazil -- where the absence of measles cases in 2017 was followed by a staggering 10,262 cases in 2018 -- topped that list. Then came Moldova, with 312 cases in 2018, and Montenegro with 203.
"Measles may be the disease, but, all too often, the real infection is misinformation, mistrust and complacency," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF executive director.
A Section on 04/26/2019