Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 27
CBS News: Measles outbreaks across North America are threatening the region’s status of having officially eliminated the virus, officials from the Pan-American Health Organization warned, potentially undoing a hard-fought victory to wipe out community transmission.
The U.N. agency pointed to a 4.5-times increase in reported measles cases this year across North and South America, compared to the same period last year.
More than 97% of cases across the region so far this year have been in the U.S. or Canada. Cases have also been reported in Mexico and Argentina.
“The risk of outbreaks has increased, given the increase in measles cases worldwide, coupled with factors such as low coverage of the first and second doses of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine,” PAHO, the World Health Organization’s regional office for the Americas, said in a report published last week.
Other factors driving spread that were cited by PAHO include increased movement of people around the Americas and an uptick in dengue, a mosquito-borne viral infection that can mask the spread of measles due to similar symptoms.
Health officials define “measles elimination” as proof of no endemic spread of the highly contagious virus within an area for at least 12 months. A continuous chain of transmission persisting for at least a year would reverse that goal.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention usually reports hundreds of measles cases every year around the U.S., many are from short-lived outbreaks linked to unvaccinated young
children who were recently outside the U.S.
The last large outbreak of the virus in the U.S. was in Illinois last year. It was largely confined to migrant shelters in Chicago.
