Benefits Due to Immunization against Measles

IN THE PAST, measles has been an almost universal childhood disease. Although many consider it to be rather benign, it sometimes has serious complications, such as encephalitis, otitis, and pneumonia. Before vaccines were widely used, this disease represented a major public health problem in the United States; an estimated 4 million cases of measles, 4, 000 cases of measles encephalitis, and 400 deaths occurred each year. The isolation of measles virus in 1954 (1) led to the development of effective vaccines. With the licensure of the live virus vaccine in 1963, a means of protecting susceptible persons in the population through vaccination became available. When in 1966 iit became apparent that measles could be eradicated in the United States, private medicine and Federal, Statei, and local governments collaborated on a major program to eliminate the disease (2, 3). This nationwide effort has had an unmisitakable effect on the incidence of measles. In 1968 the estimated number of measles cases was 250, 000 or about 6 percent of the estimated mean for the 10yea, r period (1953 through 1962) prec, eding immunization. Our objective is to quantify the national impact of immunization against mea, sles. The benefits derived from immunization can be translated into savings in school days, hospital days, dollars, morbidity, and mortality. This kind of information is pa, rticularly relevant today, when decision ma, kers in the 50-billion health services indus, try-now one of the largest and most sensitive segments of the national economy-are all too often forced to base decisions on seriously inadequa, te data.