​More and more children with measles are coming to the hospital, gradually reaching the pre-pandemic situation, with a very high number of cases, Dr. Simin Aysel Florescu, head of the Victor Babes Infectious Disease Hospital, told Novyna. ro from Bucharest. Measles is a disease that can cause serious, even fatal complications. There are parents with anti-vaccination beliefs, or they simply neglect this topic, or they do not have a family doctor and do not want to make an appointment with him, the doctor added.

“Unfortunately, the situation before the pandemic is slowly returning. As I think the world remembers, by 2019 an epidemic wave of measles developed throughout Europe, in which Romania was apparently also caught, even with a very high number of cases. It’s a disease for which there has long been a vaccine, and now, after the pandemic has virtually returned to zero due to restrictions rather than vaccination, measles cases are now resurfacing. In July, we had about 25 cases of measles in children coming from the same outbreak, unvaccinated children, even from unvaccinated mothers, so from that point of view the situation is likely to accelerate,” explains Dr. Simin Aisel Florescu.

“What protects us is the vaccine, the measles vaccine is administered from the first year of life, according to the National Immunization Program, the vaccine is available, the availability is there, it remains to convince parents to adhere to this vaccination program,” says the doctor.

Why do parents decide not to vaccinate their children?

Parents who decide not to vaccinate their children neglect this aspect or do not consult a family doctor. Because of these reasons, many children remain unimmunized, and there is a danger that the occurrence of diseases will increase when school starts.

“There are many reasons, some have anti-vaccination beliefs, some simply ignore this topic, others do not have a family doctor and do not make efforts to find one, so the etiology of this is, so to speak, multiple. situation, but it is unfortunate because Romania is a country that has had a measles vaccination program since the 70s with very high efficiency. As a doctor or student, I had never seen measles until these outbreaks started appearing in unvaccinated areas of Romania,” says Dr. Simin Icel Florescu.

“At the moment, small children are infected, they are several years old, we know that the measles vaccination is included in the triple vaccination against POR, which is given at about one year of age. So around that age they’re at risk, but obviously if we have older unvaccinated kids they’re going to be at risk as well, so on the one hand we as doctors need to have better communication from that point of view with families On the other hand, the degree of responsibility of parents should somehow increase in these children, because they are primarily interested in the well-being of the child,” says the head of the hospital Viktor Babesh.

Some of the complications of measles can be fatal. The doctor explains the existence of remote danger by the fact that the measles virus can be stored in the brain and become active after several years.

“Measles is a disease that has at least 30% complications, of various types, from respiratory, ear, eye to severe complications, even encephalitis or bronchopneumonia, some of which can even be fatal for the child, they can create unnecessary suffering. , which the vaccine prevents with great success. Let’s not forget that those who contract measles are subject to a long-term complication many years later called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, which is a fatal disease. It appears around the age of 10-14 in children who have had measles, obviously not all, but we can’t know, and it has no therapeutic solution, it’s due to the persistence of the measles virus. in the brain, which is activated years later,” says Dr. Simin Aisel Florescu.

“All of these things are vaccine-preventable, so I think the balance in terms of these possible risks, so to speak, in quotes that are minor and without any impact, against the risk of complications from disease and distance, I think that it should be to determine the right choice in the parents’ option, namely vaccination,” the doctor explains.

Dramatic cases of diseases that could have been avoided by vaccination

For his part, Dr. Adrian Marinescu, medical director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases “Matei Balsh” in the capital, draws attention to this phenomenon, saying that doctors see very serious cases of the disease precisely because of the lack of vaccination.

“Unfortunately, we did not realize that the only method of prevention of many infectious diseases is vaccination. We have reached the point where we are reluctant to vaccinate our children and have much lower vaccination rates than we should. When we talk about pneumococcal vaccination, influenza vaccination, meningococcal vaccination or hepatitis B vaccination, unfortunately the vaccination rate at the population level is categorically very low, for example for pneumococcal infection we are talking about 60% only in the case of people at risk . factors, and for others it’s a tiny percentage, whereas at the population level you have to have a much higher percentage to be comfortable being protected.”

“Unfortunately, we have serious cases in relation to our children, dramatic cases that we could easily avoid with vaccination. I believe that it is important to adhere to the vaccination calendar, to think about vaccines, which are not mandatory, but have a very important role in the prevention of infectious diseases, which in some cases can lead to severe forms and even death,” he says. Dr. Adrian Marinescu.

Confidence in vaccines has fallen

A report entitled “The State of the World’s Children 2023”, published this April by UNICEF, the first report dedicated exclusively to routine vaccination, showed that confidence in the vaccines given to children dropped by 10% in Romania during the pandemic. , as happened in 52 of the 55 countries analyzed in this report. At the same time, the pandemic has interrupted worldwide the process of vaccination against various diseases, some of them contagious, such as measles.

Some of the factors that have led to the discontinuation of vaccination in the basic schedule are the excessive burden on health care systems, the diversion of immunizing doctors to the vaccination against COVID-19, the lack of medical personnel and the isolation measures introduced during the pandemic years. . The UNICEF report also shows that between 2019 and 2021, 67 million children were not vaccinated, thus reducing vaccination coverage in more than 100 countries.

In 2020, according to WHO and UNICEF, 23 million children worldwide were not vaccinated with basic vaccines, almost 4 million more than in 2019.

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