While in France, the virus measleshas been on the rise for three years, due to an excessively low rate of vaccination coverage, the United States have just announced, in the review Jama Pediatrics, that this disease, along with rubella, has been officially wiped out from North America. The Center for Disease Control, which announced in 2011 that it was going to war against the measles and rubella viruses, therefore seems to have overcome these two contagious diseases for which there is a vaccine.
Diseases eliminated does not mean that they have completely disappeared and that there will no longer be a few cases reported sporadically. We speak of elimination of a disease when no chain transmission takes place for a year or more. This is therefore the case in the United States, where the incidence of measles has remained under one case per 1 million inhabitants and where the incidence of rubella has remained stable at one case per 10 million inhabitants since. ten years.
In France, a vaccine coverage rate of 95% would have to be achieved to eliminate the disease. Two injections of the “trivalent” measles-rubella-mumps (MMR) vaccine are necessary to be effectively protected, yet the two-dose vaccination rate is only 67% today in France.
This free vaccine (it is 100% covered by Health Insurance) is administered to toddlers according to the following vaccination schedule: one dose at 12 months and a second dose between 16 and 18 months. But to stop active transmission of the virus, all people born since 1980 who have not been vaccinated or who have only received a single dose of the vaccine (and who have never had measles) should have a catch-up vaccination. However, this is far from being the case, because the disease is not frightening, unlike vaccines.
