Editorial | Measles

0 Comments | Philadelphia Inquirer, The, January, 2007

In a victory for international cooperation, a consortium of agencies has announced impressive progress in reducing deaths from measles. Such deaths for all ages dropped from an estimated 873,000 in 1999 to 345,000 in 2005, according to the global Measles Initiative. Of those, 791,000 in 1999 and 311,000 in 2005 were of children under the age of 5.

Important principles flow from this health initiative, whose members are the American Red Cross, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.N. Foundation, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization. Americans may take one of these basic notions for granted: There is no good reason why any child, rich or poor, should die from a preventable disease. But they do. Among the reasons: Health-care systems in impoverished...