{"id":18559,"date":"2024-12-18T09:02:33","date_gmt":"2024-12-18T10:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18559"},"modified":"2024-12-18T10:26:58","modified_gmt":"2024-12-18T10:26:58","slug":"tiny-coffins-measles-is-killing-thousands-of-children-in-congo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=18559","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Coffins: Measles Is Killing Thousands of Children in Congo"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Werra Maulu Botey could not bear to close his daughter\u2019s coffin. Waiting to bury her, he slid the rough wooden lid back, again and again, to adjust her small head and smooth the cloth that cradled it away from her cheeks.<\/p>\n

Olive died of measles, at the age of 5, the evening before. She was the first child to die that weekend in an emergency measles treatment center in the town of Bikoro, in the northwest Democratic Republic of Congo. The second was her cousin, a 1-year-old girl.<\/p>\n

Measles is sweeping through the children of Bikoro, as it does every couple of years, creeping, then flaring, across this vast country.<\/p>\n

It is on the rise in other parts of the world, too \u2014 including in some communities in the United States \u2014 though the measles vaccine has been in use since 1963 and is believed to have saved more lives<\/a> than any other childhood immunization.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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There were more than 311,000 reported cases of measles in Congo last year. Some 6,000 of them ended as Olive\u2019s did: with a child buried in a small coffin days after first running a fever and breaking out in a red rash. This year, cases have been fewer \u2014 about 97,000 \u2014 but the virus has become more lethal, killing more than 2,100. It\u2019s not clear why.<\/p>\n

Globally, there were 20 percent more measles cases in 2023 than in the year before, according to the World Health Organization<\/a>, for a total of 10.3 million, and more than 107,000 people died. Fifty-seven countries had \u201clarge or disruptive\u201d outbreaks, the W.H.O. said, nearly 60 percent more than in 2022.<\/p>\n

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Werra Maulu Botey could not bear to close his daughter\u2019s coffin. Waiting to bury her, he slid the rough wooden lid back, again and again, to adjust her small head and smooth the cloth that cradled it away from her cheeks.Olive died of measles, at the age of 5, the evening before. She was the first child to die that weekend in an emergency measles treatment center in the town of Bikoro, in the northwest Democratic Republic of Congo. The second was her cousin, a 1-year-old girl.Measles is sweeping through the children of Bikoro, as it does every couple of years, creeping, then flaring, across this vast country.It is on the rise in other parts of the world, too \u2014 including in some communities in the United States \u2014 though the measles vaccine has been in use since 1963 and is believed to have saved more lives than any other childhood immunization.There were more than 311,000 reported cases of measles in Congo last year. Some 6,000 of them ended as Olive\u2019s did: with a child buried in a small coffin days after first running a fever and breaking out in a red rash. This year, cases have been fewer \u2014 about 97,000 \u2014 but the virus has become more lethal, killing more than 2,100. It\u2019s not clear why.Globally, there were 20 percent more measles cases in 2023 than in the year before, according to the World Health Organization, for a total of 10.3 million, and more than 107,000 people died. Fifty-seven countries had \u201clarge or disruptive\u201d outbreaks, the W.H.O. said, nearly 60 percent more than in 2022.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18561,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18562,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18559\/revisions\/18562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}