London risks a measles epidemic that could involve thousands of people, between 40,000 and 160,000. This is the alarm that comes from the UK Health Safety Agency which has published a document on risk assessment that there is a recovery in measles cases in the UK.
In the UK, we have never achieved the WHO target of 95% coverage with 2 doses of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine needed to achieve and maintain measles elimination.
Currently, coverage is the lowest in a decade, and around 1 in 10 children make it to school age unprotected from infection.
Based on the projections, the UK experts explain, “the risk of widespread transmission of measles, leading to an epidemic throughout the UK, is considered low”.
However, the case of London is different. Indeed, the capital has one of the lowest coverage rates (82.5% with one dose after 2 years and 74.1% with two doses after 5 years). Furthermore, there are large inequalities related to ethnicity, economic conditions and areas of residence. Vaccination rates are even lower in some communities (religious minorities, pseudoscience enthusiasts, migrants). Very vulnerable to the infection is also the group of young adults between 19 and 25 years old, victims of the hoax on the link between vaccines and autism in the early 2000s (not surprisingly called “Wakefield cohorts”, from the name of the doctor who authored the study vaccine fraud and autism).
“Measles can be a serious infection that can lead to complications especially in young children and those with weakened immune systems. Due to especially long-standing suboptimal vaccine coverage, there is now a very real risk of seeing large outbreaks a London,” UKHSA consultant Vanessa Saliba said in a statement.
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