“For most of us, measles and whooping cough are diseases of the past. You get a few shots as a kid and then hardly think about them again. But that’s not the case in all parts of the world — not even parts of the U.S.”
A recent story on NPR shows a fascinating interactive map created by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The map illustrates the return of preventable diseases around the world.
Childhood immunization rates in parts of Europe and the United Kingdom have decreased dramatically since 1998, and along with them, the occurrence of preventable diseases has spiked.
Measles has returned at an astounding rate: in 2011, France reported nearly 15,000 cases, a number topped that year worldwide only by the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Somalia. In 2012 in the U.K., more than 2,000 cases of measles were reported, the most since 1994.
In the United States, the largest recurrence of preventable disease has been seen in cases of whooping cough. 2012 reported nearly 50,000 cases, and while a dramatic drop to about 24,000 occurred in 2013, that’s still more than 10 times more than in the early 1980s when whooping cough infected fewer than 2,000 people.
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Read the entire article on NPR.org to see the Council on Foreign Relations’s interactive map.
Image: still
shot from interactive map from the original article.