Wellington – The small Pacific island nation of Samoa has closed schools and is restricting travel ahead of the Christmas holiday season as the death toll from a measles outbreak tops 50, in the latest flare-up of a global epidemic of the virus.
The highly infectious disease has been crossing the globe, recently finding a susceptible population in Samoa, where vaccine coverage was only about 31% when measles took hold, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
In just over two weeks, the official death toll has jumped more than ten-fold to 53 on Monday, the Samoan government said. There are now …read more
Source:: Independent Online
