Effectiveness and Timing of Vaccination during School Measles Outbreak

ECDC comment
​Vaccine coverage is high in most European countries (80-95%), however not high enough to prevent large community outbreaks of measles, normally clustered around schools. There is no recommendationfor implementing outbreak-response vaccination campaigns in settings where incidence and morbidity and mortality rates are low, such as in the EU.

Marinović AA, Swaan C, Wichmann O, van Steenbergen J, Kretzschmar M. Emerg Infect Dis. 2012 Sep;18(9):1405-13. doi: 10.3201/eid1809.111578

Vaccine coverage is high in most European countries (80-95%), however not high enough to prevent large community outbreaks of measles, normally clustered around schools. There is no recommendationfor implementing outbreak-response vaccination campaigns in settings where incidence and morbidity and mortality rates are low, such as in the EU.

In this study, the authors focused on outbreak-response vaccination campaigns that targeted establishments with children where a measles outbreak was occurring in settings with high vaccination coverage (>80%) and found that it is possible to reduce the number of cases during a measles outbreak in a school by applying a school wide vaccination strategy within a realistic time frame.

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