DFID, PETE LEWIS
Nearly all of the limited healthcare resources of Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone were diverted last year to cope with the Ebola crisis, leading to a drop in vaccination rates that could portend bigger measles outbreaks in the future, according to a study published this week (March 12) in Science.
Each measles patient can transmit the disease to an estimated 12 to 18 people. To understand how a reduced vaccination rate might affect future measles outbreaks, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Princeton University, Penn State University, and the University of Southampton modeled the impact of a 75 percent decrease in vaccination rate over 18 months of the Ebola epidemic.
The scientists found that such a drop in the vaccination rate ...
