Vaccines are amazing
According to an international committee of experts meeting last week at the
Pan Health Organization/World Health Organization:
"The elimination of rubella from the Americas is a historic achievement that reflects the collective will of our region's countries to work together to achieve ambitious public health milestones," said PAHO/WHO Director Carissa F. Etienne. "Ours was the first region to eradicate smallpox, the first to eliminate polio, and now the first to eliminate rubella. All four achievements prove the value of immunization and how important it is to make vaccines available even to the remotest corners of our hemisphere."
This is an effort that has been 15 years in the making:
Following the widespread adoption of the MMR vaccine in the region's national immunization programs, PAHO/WHO member countries in 1994 set the target of eliminating measles by 2000 and then in 2003 set the goal of eliminating rubella by 2010.
In the late 1990s, the English-speaking Caribbean countries pioneered the use of mass rubella vaccination campaigns targeting adolescents and adults. With support from PAHO/WHO and its Revolving Fund for Vaccine Procurement, which helps countries procure vaccines at lower cost, some 250 million adolescents and adults in 32 countries and territories were vaccinated against rubella between 1998 and 2008.
Rubella, or German measles, while usually not fatal in young people and adults, is brutally
destructive on children in utero.
The disease, also known as German measles, once infected millions of people in the Western Hemisphere. In a 1964-65 outbreak in the United States, 11,000 fetuses were miscarried, died in the womb or were aborted, and 20,000 babies were born with defects.
The last confirmed endemic in the Americas came back in 2009 in Argentina.
Public health authorities had to review 165 million records and do 1.3 million checks to see if any communities had rubella cases. All recent cases had to be genetically tested at the C.D.C. to confirm that they were caused by known imported strains of the virus, not by quietly circulating domestic ones.
As with measles, there is no cure for rubella, but the disease is prevented by a very effective vaccine. In the United States, the shot usually contains three vaccines and is known as M.M.R., for measles, mumps and rubella.
This is a real victory for humanity and science.