The increase in cases of measles and other infectious diseases due to the fall of vaccination rates has unleashed alarms in … everyone. The European Center for disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has launched this week a message of concern “for non -optimal vaccination coverage” that are being recorded in the continent.
According to ECDC data, 35,000 measles cases in Europe (85% of them, in Romania), with 23 deaths have been counted in the first months of the year. In Spain, the Carlos III Institute has collected 193 cases from January 1 to April 20, with important outbreaks in the Basque Country and Malaga.
«Thanks to vaccination, we have eradicated smallpox and controlled serious diseases such as polio, diphtheria and tetanus. It is necessary to intensify efforts to maintain high vaccination coverage, ”says Pamela Rendo-Wagner, director of the ECDC.
The key to increasing measles is in breach of vaccinations to vaccinate 95% of children with triple viral. Spain does not reach that percentage in the second dose, the necessary to consider that it is immunized against the disease, although it is close and the situation is not yet worrying. «In Spain, we are lucky that pediatric nursing has high credibility. But above all, we have to end the bulles. Measles is not cured with vitamin A, measles is prevented with vaccines, ”explains Professor Ángel Gil, professor of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at Rey Juan Carlos University.
Europe begins to see closely a problem that the United States already suffers. Rubeola, paperas, polio, diphtheria and, above all, measles, could become the next two decades, again, in endemic diseases due to the remarkable fall in the immunization rates of the population. The case of Texas, where an outbreak has left more than 600 infected, 64 hospitalized and two dead children, can be the new standard if vaccination policies do not change radically, according to a study conducted by researchers from Stanford University and other universities published in the scientific journal Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
-With the current vaccination indices, which are between 85 and 93% depending on the states, scientists already foresee 851,000 measles cases per year, 170,200 income and 2,550 deaths. But if there is a 10% decrease in immunization rates, the infection figure would rise to 11.1 million and in the event that the indices fell 25%, the number of infected in the next 25 years could rise to 26.9 million, 5.4 million hospitalizations and 80,600 deaths.
Disinformation
The report lists the causes of vaccination decrease: the lack of risk perception, after the fall of cases due to the wide immunization of the population in the previous decades; The misinformation about the efficacy and safety of vaccines, which grew very importantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, but that in the United States had a long tradition by the hand of its strong anti-vacussion movement; And specifically, the doubts about the triple viral (measles, paper and rubella) after the appearance in 1998 of a study that linked this vaccine with autism. The alleged investigation was refuted and withdrawn, and its author was expelled from the General Council of Medicine of the United Kingdom, but the bad of distrust remained among a good part of the citizenship.
«What is happening in the United States, and also in the United Kingdom, is that high vaccination rates had caused the disease to be considered eliminated, but not eradicated. But if vaccination falls, the virus is still there and outbreaks will appear, ”explains Ángel Gil.
“The decrease in children’s vaccination rates will increase the frequency and size of the outbreaks of preventable infections by previously eliminated vaccination, which will finally lead to their return to endemic levels,” summary, for their part, the authors of the study, which endorse “the need to continue with routine childhood vaccination with high coverage to prevent the resurgence of infectious diseases.”
