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The health secretary of the Philippines said that 136 people, mostly children, died of measles and 8,400 others became ill during an epidemic partly attributable to recent fears related to vaccination.
Health Secretary Francisco Duque III announced Monday that a massive vaccination campaign that began last week in Manila and four provincial regions could contain the epidemic by April.
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President Rodrigo Duterte warned Friday in a televised message of life-threatening complications and urged children to be vaccinated. The epidemic began in January.
A woman from New South Wales returned from the Philippines with the virus. Authorities urged people traveling to Southeast Asia to ensure that they are fully vaccinated before going abroad.
Measles is a highly contagious respiratory infection that is spread by coughing or sneezing.
Symptoms only appear 10 to 14 days after exposure and include fever, pain, cough, runny nose, inflamed eyes, sore throat, rash with redness of the skin, headache, sore throats throat, swollen lymph nodes.
Duque said that a government information campaign was helping to restore public confidence in its vaccination program, which had been tainted in 2017 by a dengue vaccine manufactured by French manufacturer Sanofi, accused of deaths of at least three children.
In the Ukrainian capital, measles was hit for the first time by a major epidemic, said Monday the Ministry of Health.
A 57-year-old woman died at the hospital of complications related to this highly contagious disease, told AFP Maryna Dadinova, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Health.
Eight people, including two children, died of measles in Ukraine this year. There have been 16 deaths nationwide in 2018.
About 20,000 people in Ukraine have contracted this highly contagious viral disease since the beginning of the year.
According to the United Nations Agency for Children, UNICEF, only 42% of children aged one year had been vaccinated by the end of 2016.
The Ukrainian authorities and international organizations attribute this epidemic to a long interruption of vaccination.
In May 2018, a head of the National Academy of Medicine, Fedir Lapiy, said that "the reluctance of parents to vaccinate their children comes from mistrust of vaccines, mistrust of the children. In respect of doctors ". Measles cases have more than tripled in Europe in 2018, and Ukraine is climbing.
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