The measles outbreak of 2019 could be due to the 21 million children who do not get the vaccine – Quartz

In the midst of new serious measles outbreaks in several countries around the world, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) released this week a report showing that 21.1 million children do not receive the first dose of measles vaccine each year, thus creating the global epidemic.

Measles can cause fever, cough and rashes, but also blindness and brain damage in severe cases. It kills about 110,000 children each year. Thanks to the discovery of a measles vaccine, the disease has been effectively eradicated in many of the world's richest countries and deaths related to the disease have fallen by 80% between 2000 and 2017 in the world. But the rise of the anti-vaccine sentiment and global complacency (paywall) in the face of the seriousness of the disease have allowed him to return to some countries, including the United States.

The measles vaccine requires two doses to effectively protect children against the disease. According to UNICEF, only 85% of children in the world received a first dose of the vaccine in 2017 and only 67% received the second dose. This threshold is far below the 93-95% threshold set by the World Health Organization as a group immunity (pdf), the point at which all members of a given community are protected from the disease, even if they can not get the vaccine themselves. In a press release, UNICEF attributed this to "a lack of access, poor health systems, complacency and, in some cases, fear or skepticism about vaccines. ".

Rich countries generally have better vaccination rates than poor ones. According to UNICEF, 94% of children in rich countries receive the first dose of the measles vaccine, although coverage for the second dose drops to 91%. But not all rich countries reach the levels of herd immunity. Between 2010 and 2017, in seven rich countries, less than 95% of children received the first dose of the measles vaccine:

The situation is much more worrying in low- and middle-income countries, where the report indicates that the number of children who do not receive the first and especially the second dose of measles vaccine is "critical".

"The fundamentals of measles outbreaks that we have witnessed today were laid out years ago," said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore in the statement. "The measles virus will always find unvaccinated children."