Wellington - The small Pacific
island nation of Samoa has closed schools and is restricting
travel ahead of the Christmas holiday season as the death toll
from a measles outbreak tops 50, in the latest flare-up of a
global epidemic of the virus.
The highly infectious disease has been crossing the globe,
recently finding a susceptible population in Samoa, where
vaccine coverage was only about 31% when measles took hold,
according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
In just over two weeks, the official death toll has jumped
more than ten-fold to 53 on Monday, the Samoan government said.
There are now more than 3,700 cases of measles recorded in the
islands' deeply religious population of around 200,000.
"All our schools are closed, national exams have been
postponed," Reverend Vavatau Taufao, general secretary of the
Congregation Christian Church in Samoa, told Reuters.
"We are still having church services but if it gets worse we
will have to stop church altogether - and it's almost
Christmas."
The vast majority of deaths were of children, with 48 out of
the 53 aged four or under dying from the disease, according to a
government update.
Measles cases are rising worldwide, even in wealthy nations
such as Germany and the United States, as parents shun
immunisation for philosophical or religious reasons, or fears,
debunked by doctors, that such vaccines could cause autism.
Other nations, through either poverty or poor planning, have
let immunisation levels slip, exposing their youngest members to
a disease that aggressively attacks the immune system.
WHO warned in October of a devastating comeback in measles
epidemics as the number of reported cases rose by 300 percent in
the first three months of this year.
Reported measles cases are the highest they have been in any
year since 2006, WHO said.
After causing devastation in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Madagascar and Ukraine, among others, measles cases
started appearing en masse earlier this year in the New Zealand
city of Auckland, a hub for travel to and from small Pacific
islands.
Dr Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccinologist at the University
of Auckland, said there were pockets of the community where
immunisation rates had slipped, allowing the disease to take
hold.
"It's about being a good global citizen really, in that we
all have to do our bit," said Petousis-Harris.
"I don't think that the response here has been a shining
example. Because first of all we were aware of the possibility
or the potential for this and that’s been the case for a long
time."
Samoan authorities have blamed low coverage rates in Samoa
in part on fears caused last year when two babies died after
receiving vaccinations shots, according to local media reports.
The country's immunisation programme was also temporarily
suspended. The deaths were later found to have been caused by
medications that were wrongly mixed.
Samoa has been racing to administer vaccines to children
since declaring a state of emergency on Nov. 20 and has
vaccinated 58,150 people so far, the government said on Monday.
Infection rates and deaths are still, however, climbing
quickly with five fatalities in the past 24 hours, according to
government data, prompting emergency restrictions on public
gatherings and travel leading up to Christmas.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters
they were sending additional vaccines and dozens of medical
professionals to Samoa to help with the outbreak.
The government in Tonga attributed a recent outbreak of
measles in the small Pacific island community to a squad of
rugby players returning from New Zealand, although higher
vaccination rates in Tonga - and in neighbouring Fiji - have
helped stem the outbreak.