2013 Swansea measles epidemic
Measles epidemic in Wales, UK
The 2012–2013 Swansea measles epidemic began in November 2012 and was declared over on 3 July 2013. There were a total of 1,219 measles notifications (suspected cases) in Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Bridgend, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Powys, with 1,455 measles notifications for the whole of Wales, 664 of which were in Swansea alone. A total of 88 people were hospitalised for measles infection during the epidemic. One death was reported: a 25-year-old man with giant cell pneumonia brought on by measles infection died on 18 April 2013. The cost associated with treating the sick and controlling the outbreak exceeded £470,000 ($701,898).
History
Some sources linked the outbreak with the MMR vaccine controversy and a campaign in the South Wales Evening Post in the 1990s against the MMR vaccine, as the majority of those who became infected were not immunised as infants during the MMR scare. Uptake of the MMR vaccine fell from 94% of two-year-olds in Wales in 1995 to 78% by 2003. In the Swansea area the uptake fell to 67.5%. The South Wales Evening Post was also criticised for appearing to exaggerate the number of confirmed measles cases that occurred during the epidemic.
In the wake of the outbreak MMR clinics were set up in four hospitals in Swansea and Neath-Port Talbot and vaccinated over 35,000 people.
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This entry incorporates text from “2013 Swansea measles epidemic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.