As newly emerging cases of measles have been reported in the United States, and Europe is also facing an outbreak, health authorities worldwide are calling for vaccination, drawing attention to this old but still unresolved contagious disease.
However, when measles swept the world in the last century, it was not a vaccine that saved millions of lives.
An Old, Severe Illness
Almost all children contracted measles in the first half of the 20th century.
Prior to the 1960s, an estimated 30 million cases and 2.6 million deaths due to measles occurred annually worldwide.
Young children have been the most affected, as seen in 1906 when 85 percent of reported deaths were children under age 5. From 1912 to 1922, an average of 6,000 measles-related deaths in the United States were reported each year.
Although measles was declared eradicated in the United States in 2000, new cases have emerged during the past decades. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) documented 1,274 cases in 31 states in 2019, reaching a peak in cases during the last decade.
Despite massive global vaccination in the current era, in 2015 alone, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported around 134,200 deaths attributed to measles.
Similar to SARS-CoV-2
Dating back to the 9th century, the Persian physician Abū Bakr Muhammad Zakariyyā Rāzī (Rhazes) documented measles. In 1757, Scottish doctor Francis Home determined that measles was caused by an infectious agent, marking a significant advancement in understanding the disease.
Soley found in humans, the measles virus is a negative-strand RNA virus, similar to SARS-CoV-2, meaning that the genetic material of both viruses needs to be “flipped” before functioning.
Hellbound and Down 