WHO urges urgent measles vaccination for children amidst global outbreak surge

Vaccinating children who missed their measles shots during the COVID-19 pandemic is critical, a senior World Health Organization official said on Tuesday, as infectious disease outbreaks increase worldwide.

Addressing the media, Kate O’Brien, WHO director of immunisation said that more than 50 countries have experienced “large and disruptive” measles outbreaks in the last year, twice as many as in 2022.

Measles is a viral illness characterised by flu-like symptoms and a distinctive rash. While it can be fatal, the disease is preventable through vaccination, typically administered in two doses.

COVID-19 massively disrupted routine vaccination efforts worldwide, and around 60 million children missed their doses over that period, O’Brien said. She said catch-up efforts were “really critical”.

“It’s now a race between whether the catch-up activities can happen quickly enough or whether the outbreaks will continue to scale,” she said. On Monday, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also urged people to get vaccinated against measles amid rising cases globally.

WHO experts also backed new ways of using existing vaccines to tackle other disease outbreaks, including the use of the mpox vaccine made by Bavarian Nordic for at-risk children in African countries.

They also recommended the use of the hepatitis E vaccine for all women of childbearing age in conflicts and other emergency settings. The infection, mostly transmitted through contaminated water, can be particularly dangerous for pregnant women.

The vaccine, developed by China’s Xiamen Innovax Biotech, has not been widely used outside China although it has been backed by WHO for use in outbreaks since 2015.

The chair of the WHO’s expert vaccine committee, Hanna Nohynek, told the press conference that the focus on outbreaks was a sign that “the normalcy is starting to be living with outbreaks… that’s kind of alarming.”

With inputs from agencies.