Sunday, December 01, 2019

Samoa measles cases, deaths more than double over past week

https://news.yahoo.com/samoa-measles-cases-deaths-more-043432925.html

By Lidia Kelly
,Reuters•November 30, 2019

The number of suspected cases of measles on the Pacific island of Samoa has more than doubled over the past week to 3,530 and deaths related to the outbreak rose to 48 from 20 a week ago, the country's Ministry of Health said on Sunday.

Samoa has become vulnerable to measles outbreaks as the number of people becoming immunized has declined with the World Health Organisation (WHO) saying vaccine coverage is just about 31%.

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Of the 48 deaths, 44 where among children under the age of four. Since Saturday, there have been 173 new cases of measles recorded and four people have died.

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Posted by Patricia at 11:27 PM
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2 comments:

rjs said...

i have a hard time understanding this, Patricia; when we were kids in the 50s, everyone got the measles, mumps and chicken pox, "the childhood diseases", and got over them; it was just a fact of life...i remember the theory was we should get them all over with before we started school, so we wouldn't miss any classes, so when i got each of those diseases, i passed them on to my younger brother & sister, so they'd get over them, too...there were no vaccines back then, of course, but no one i knew considered those diseases life-threatening...

12:07 AM
Patricia said...

But they were life threatening to some children. As far as I know, I didn't know anybody except an uncle who had had polio, but that didn't mean it wasn't dangerous. And these infections did lasting damage to some, who often didn't know about it. I was planning on putting up an article on how measles affects the immune system. Eg., chicken pox hides out in the body and later causes shingles, very painful, in some people in later life. Both my parents had shingles. Chicken pox can result in shingles even for someone like me who was exposed to it, from my siblings, but never showed the rash.

3:47 PM

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