"The Americas region has shown that with strong national immunization programs... dedicated financing and strong political commitment and partner support, measles can be stopped," said World Health Organization director Margaret Chan (AFP Photo/Joe Raedle)

Miami (AFP) - Measles has been eradicated from the Americas after decades of vaccination efforts, the world's first region to rid itself of the highly contagious disease, global health authorities said Tuesday. "This is truly a historic deed," said Carissa Etienne, director of the PAHO, which serves as the World Health Organization's (WHO) regional office for the Americas. Measles remains a top killer of children worldwide, and took nearly 115,000 lives in 2014 -- or about 13 deaths every hour -- according to the World Health Organization (WHO). About 250,000 people were infected with measles last year, most in Africa and Asia, the PAHO said. It can cause serious complications including blindness, encephalitis, severe diarrhea, ear infections and pneumonia, particularly in children with nutritional problems and in immunocompromised patients. MORE: After Marrying On Her ‘Deathbed,’ This Bride Made a Miraculous Recovery After Quitting 1 Food

Following this strategy, the last indigenous measles outbreak was registered in Venezuela in 2002. Normally, it takes three years without cases to declare a disease eradicated from a region, but in this instance it took 14 years. Factors such as conflicts that made it difficult to access some communities slowed down the verification process, said Merceline Dahl-Regis, chair of a committee of experts responsible for verifying the elimination of measles and other diseases in the Americas. All of our national wealth and infrastructure can’t protect us from people who refuse to have their children vaccinated. It is the result of a commitment made more than two decades ago, in 1994, when the countries of the Americas pledged to end measles circulation by the turn of the 21st century.”

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Before mass vaccination was initiated in 1980, measles caused nearly 2.6 million annual deaths worldwide. After declaring the elimination of rubella and congenital rubella syndrome in 2015, the International Expert Committee waited for evidence of the interruption of a measles outbreak in Brazil, which had begun in 2013 and lasted for more than a year.
The WHO announces that measles has been eliminated throughout the Americas, the first time this virus has been eradicated in an entire region. The hemisphere’s last endemic case of measles — one which did not spring from an imported strain — was in 2002.