BACKGROUND Routine vaccination supplemented by planned campaigns occurring at 2-5 y intervals is the core of current measles control and elimination efforts. Yet, large, unexpected outbreaks still occur, even when control measures appear effective. Supplementing these activities with mass vaccination campaigns triggered when low levels of measles immunity are observed in a sample of the populat...

BACKGROUND China pledged to join the global effort to eliminate measles by 2012. To improve measles control strategy, the epidemic trend and population immunity of measles were investigated in 1951-2011 in Beijing. METHODS The changing trend of measles since 1951 was described based on measles surveillance data from Beijing Centre of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The measles vaccinati...

An outbreak of measles occurred in a high school with a documented vaccination level of 98 per cent. Nineteen (70 per cent) of the cases were students who had histories of measles vaccination at 12 months of age or older and are therefore considered vaccine failures. Persons who were unimmunized or immunized at less than 12 months of age had substantially higher attack rates compared to those i...

INTRODUCTION During the final phase of measles elimination rigorous investigation of each individual case becomes fundamental to confirm or discard cases, particularly among vaccinated people, since they experience a milder disease, and laboratory diagnosis is more complex. Our study focused in the epidemiology of measles in vaccinated people. METHODS Longitudinal study on measles cases in tw...

Measles and pertussis are ubiquitous vaccine-preventable diseases, which remain an important public health problem in developing countries. Hence, developing a deep understanding of their transmission dynamics remains imperative. To achieve this, we compared the impact of vaccination at both individual and population levels in a Senegalese rural community. This study represents the first such c...

From March 1991 to April 1992, 250 measles suspected cases were studied in the Municipality of Niterói, State of Rio de Janeiro. The median age found was 11 years and 76.0% of the cases were in school age children. Exposure histories were present in 149 patients and schools were the most frequent sites of transmission (45.0%). Vaccination status was known for 127 studied cases and 76.4% of them...

BACKGROUND Measles vaccination over the past 50 years has greatly reduced the incidence of measles. However, measles among migrants and the resulting changes in epidemiological characteristics have brought new challenges to the elimination of measles. We aim to describe the measles epidemic trend over the past 30 years in a central district in Shanghai, China. METHODS The present study was co...

OBJECTIVE We aimed to quantify progress towards measles elimination in Germany from 2007 to 2011 and to estimate any potential underreporting over this period. METHODS We determined the annual incidence of notified cases of measles - for each year - in northern, western, eastern and southern Germany and across the whole country. We then used measles-related health insurance claims to estimate...

Since the early 1990s, the Netherlands has experienced several large measles epidemics, in 1992-94, 1999-2000 and in 2013-14. These outbreaks mainly affected orthodox Protestants, a geographically clustered population with overall lower measles-mumps-rubella first dose (MMR-1) vaccination coverage (60%) than the rest of the country (> 95%). In the 2013-14 epidemic described here, which occurred...

Recurrent epidemics of measles in developed countries offer a proving ground for current theories of complicated dynamics in ecological and epidemiological systems. This paper contrasts the basic forced SEIR model for measles with a variety of more complicated and realistic models, showing that variations in seasonal forcing and age-structured mixing patterns can generate a wide range of global...