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Dakar – The government of the Democratic Republic of Congo has declared a measles epidemic that, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Health, has already killed at least 1,500 people, more than a hundred more than the number of deaths due to Ebola.
Although health officials have focused on the Ebola haemorrhagic virus in eastern Congo, about 87,000 suspected cases of measles have been reported across the country since the beginning of the year, more than than the 65,000 registered last year.
The Congo Ministry of Health announced the measles figure when he declared the outbreak on Monday.
The medical badociation Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced Tuesday that 1,500 deaths from measles had been recorded in the first five months of 2019, the highest since 2012, the most common measles epidemic murderous of the last decade.
The Ebola virus has so far killed 1,390 people in the Congolese province of North Kivu, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Health.
MSF called for "a mbadive mobilization of all relevant national and international organizations to vaccinate more children and treat patients" with measles.
The Ministry of Health announced that its vaccination campaign would target 1.4 million newborns and that 2.2 million had been vaccinated in April.
Health officials say comprehensive vaccination programs are the only way to prevent measles from spreading in an uncontrollable way, but that uninformed opponents can sometimes sabotage such plans.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) launched a #VaccinesWork campaign in April to combat hostile reactions to the vaccination of some parents in different parts of the world.
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