Once again, anti vaxxers have a lot to answer for. A state of emergency has been called in Samoa, closing all schools and cracking down on people under 17 gathering in public as a way to try and handle a measles epidemic that’s affecting the whole island.
There have been 716 suspected cases of measles since late October, which is a huge amount seeing as Samoa only has a population of 200 000. Of those 716 suspected cases, 40% were bad enough that the person was sent to the hospital.
At least six deaths have been linked to the outbreak, mostly unvaccinated kids under two.
At the moment, the Samoan health ministry is reporting that about a third of the entire population of Samoa is unvaccinated.
The government is going to make getting a vaccine a “mandatory legal requirement” for unvaccinated people, but it may be too little too late. Their director general of health, Leausa Take Naseri, has predicted that the situation is going to get worse.
“The way it is going now and the poor (immunisation) coverage, we are anticipating the worst to come.”
The best guess at this point is that measles got to the island in the first place after some Tongan rugby players got back from New Zealand, and from there it spread around to Samoa.
The island right next door to Samoa is called American Samoa, and their vaccination rates are 90%. In the same time frame, there have been far fewer cases of measles reported, and no reported measles-related deaths.
The world was so close to getting rid of measles. As recently as 2016, measles was declared eradicated in the Americas, but we’re seeing the disease come back with the rise of the anti vax movement. The most recent World Health Organisation data says that “all regions of the world experiencing sustained rises in cases” of measles, so that’s just fan-bloody-tastic.