Measles has killed nearly 5,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019, authorities said, after the disease spread to all the provinces in the country.’<\/p>\n
Close to a quarter of a million people have been infected this year alone.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization (WHO) says this is the world’s largest and fastest-moving epidemic.<\/p>\n
Measles in DR Congo has now killed more than twice the number who have died of Ebola there in the last 15 months.<\/p>\n
The Congolese government and the WHO launched\u00a0 an emergency vaccination programme \u00a0in September that aimed to inoculate more than 800,000 children.<\/p>\n
But poor infrastructure, attacks on health centres and a lack of access to routine healthcare have all hindered efforts to stop the spread of the disease.<\/p>\n
Four million children have been vaccinated, but experts warn that this amounts to less than half of the total in the country – and not enough vaccines are available.<\/p>\n
The majority of those infected with measles in the country are infants.<\/p>\n
Measles is a virus that initially causes a runny nose, sneezing and fever. Most people will recover, but measles can cause life-long disability. It can be deadly, especially if it causes pneumonia in the lungs or encephalitis (swelling in the brain).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Measles has killed nearly 5,000 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2019, authorities said, after the disease spread to all the provinces in the country.’ Close to a quarter of a million people have been infected this year alone. The World Health Organization (WHO) says this is the world’s largest and fastest-moving epidemic. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":12057,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1462,12,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-africa","category-health","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12058,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12056\/revisions\/12058"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}