Abstract
From 1 October 2010 to 31 December 2011, Italy experienced high measles burden with 5,568 measles cases (37.4% laboratory-confirmed) reported to the enhanced measles surveillance system (cumulative incidence in the 15-month reference period: 9.2/100,000 population). Adolescents and young adults were especially affected, and the median age of cases was 18 years. Most cases (95.8%) were either unvaccinated or incompletely vaccinated. Complications were reported for 20.3% of cases, including 135 cases of pneumonia, seven of encephalitis and one case of Guillain–Barré syndrome. One death occurred in an immunocompromised adult. Over 1,300 cases were hospitalised. Identified priorities for reaching the measles elimination goal include evidence-based interventions such as reminder/recall for both doses of measles vaccine, supplementary immunisation activities aimed at susceptible age cohorts, and vaccinating healthcare workers.
Highlights
Measles is an acute viral illness with the potential for severe and life-threatening complications
Thanks to intensive vaccination and surveillance efforts, elimination was achieved in the World Health Organization (WHO) Region of the Americas in 2002 and in many other countries such as Finland and South Korea [1, 4,5]
In this article we describe measles cases reported to the Italian national measles surveillance system with dates of rash onset between 1 October 2010 and 31 December 2011, and discuss some of the priorities for reaching measles elimination
Summary
Measles is an acute viral illness with the potential for severe and life-threatening complications. Since measles virus infects only humans, elimination is possible, and all regions of the World Health Organization (WHO) except the South-East Asia Region have set an elimination goal to be achieved by 2020 or sooner [1,2]. In the European Region the target date for elimination has recently been moved from 2010 to 2015. As most other European countries, Italy failed to reach measles elimination by 2010 and in accordance with European goals, revised its target date for elimination to 2015 [3]. Thanks to intensive vaccination and surveillance efforts, elimination was achieved in the WHO Region of the Americas in 2002 and in many other countries such as Finland (in 1994) and South Korea (in 2006) [1, 4,5]
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