Sådan er det langt fra gået. Verdenssundheds-organisationen (WHO) må tværtimod konstatere, at tallet er betydeligt lavere og der er faresignaler forude, fordi den farlige og smitsomme sygdom mange steder ikke tages alvorligt mere.
LONDON, 24 April 2012 (IRIN): Vaccines against measles have been around for decades and are highly effective, yet the campaign against the disease in recent years has had a bumpy ride.
The first target of the 21st century – to halve the number of deaths from measles between 1999 and 2005 – was successfully met. So the World Health Organization (WHO) set an even more ambitious goal – to reduce deaths by 90 percent from 2000 levels by 2010.
Now some elaborate number crunching by experts from WHO, the US-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Pennsylvania State University has produced disappointing news.
Their study, published Tuesday in the London-based medical journal, The Lancet, concludes that although gains were rapid between 2000 and 2007, progress slowed towards the end of the decade, and the final reduction in mortality by 2010 was only 74 percent – good, but not nearly as good as had been hoped.
The executive director of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Anthony Lake, says vaccination campaigns now reach around 95 percent of all the world’s children.
“This shows, that these campaigns can succeed, even in the world’s poorest countries and most remote communities. Really this is one of the most remarkable victories in the history of public health”, he says.
“The bad news is that every day measles still claims 382 lives, the vast majority of them children under five, and every one could have been saved by two doses of a 22 cent (godt en krone) vaccine.”
Some parts of the world have been more successful than others.
Measles has been effectively eliminated in the whole of the Americas since 2002 – reduced to the point where there is no more endemic transmission of the disease, and any cases or outbreaks are the result of imported infections from other regions. China and its neighbours are also getting close to getting rid of measles.
But the disease is so infectious (smitsom) and so efficient at seeking out those who have not been vaccinated that even these regions cannot afford to let their levels of vaccination coverage drop.
Rebecca Martin, director of the Global Immunization Division at CDC, warns against complacency (at læne sig tilbage).
“Measles is a serious and potentially fatal disease that will return when it has the opportunity to do so. In many countries the overwhelming success we have seen with the immunization programme has led to the decreased recognition and risk perception of the severe outcome of this disease, but it is always there and will come back if given the opportunity to do so,” she notes.
Almost all the cases now seen in the USA are imported, almost half of them from Europe.
Europe has had outbreaks of measles in recent years, but contributes very little to the global death toll; good health care means that very few children there die of measles. It is the very fact that Europeans do not perceive it as a deadly disease that makes some parents careless about vaccinating their children against it.
India overtakes (overhaler) Africa
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95349/HEALTH-Beating-measles-one-more-push
