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WHO: Measles incidence has fallen by 60% in the last 10 years
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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A decade-long effort by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) to increase the number of children revaccinated against measles has yielded results.
However, progress is uneven and the threat of outbreaks of the disease in different regions of the planet remains, according to WHO experts, authors of the report published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. The report provides indicators of measles incidence in the world for the period from 2000 to 2010.
During this time, the number of measles cases registered worldwide each year has fallen by 60 percent (from 853,480 to 339,845 cases per year). The incidence rate has fallen by 66 percent, from 146 cases per million people to 50. Measles deaths have fallen from 733,000 in 2000 to 164,000 in 2008.
One of the report's authors, Robert Perry, of the WHO's Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals Division, notes that the world's lowest level of measles cases was in 2008, with 277,968 cases. That average remained unchanged in 2009, although there was a slight increase in Africa (from 37,012 to 83,479) and the Eastern Mediterranean (from 12,120 to 36,605). This was balanced by a decline in the Western Pacific (from 147,987 to 66,609 cases).
In 2010, the number of reported measles cases worldwide increased to 339 845 as a result of outbreaks in several countries, including Malawi (118 712 cases), Burkina Faso (54 118) and Iraq (30 328).
The increase in incidence in 2010 occurred despite the continued expansion of vaccination and revaccination programmes for children with the WHO-recommended measles-containing vaccine MCV1.
The report's authors see the reasons for this in the weakening of political and financial commitments by individual countries to provide every child with two doses of the vaccine.
However, the overall measles vaccination rate worldwide increased from 72 percent in 2000 to 85 percent in 2010.
Thanks to additional immunization efforts by global organizations, one billion children have received the measles-containing MCV1 vaccine in 10 years.