This is the question that Dr. Maurizio Zanda always asks mothers who confide in him the fear of vaccinating their children: "Do you know how many children die of measles every year?". Three hundred thousand, says the director of the pediatric complex at the Brotzu hospital in Cagliari. “Now they will be a little less: 200, 150 thousand, and for one simple reason: vaccination programs have been brought to Africa. But, when there is a vaccine available, even the death of a single child from such a stupid disease is something inadmissible ».

He convinces many of them, Dr. Zanda. «It is a job that we pediatricians do: we are used to talking about vaccines and we know which diseases they have eliminated. Diseases such as polio, smallpox, measles, diphtheria. My father told me about children who died of diphtheria in his time, while I, thanks to the vaccine, in thirty years of experience I have never seen any ».

There is the vaccine, goodbye, but we have seen how little it takes for measles to be scary again. In 2019 there was a surge in cases worldwide (with 207 thousand deaths, according to a study by the World Health Organization and the CDC, the Public Health Control Centers in the United States), 600 infections in Italy among January and March. What happened? The vaccination coverage had dropped, a backlash of the ideas of many no vax parents.

The Lorenzin law of 2017 - which imposed the vaccination obligation for chicken pox, whooping cough, haemophilus, rubella, mumps and, in fact, measles; adding them to diphtheria, tetanus, polio, hepatitis B already foreseen in the pediatric calendar - it had not yet unfolded its effects. Without the vaccine, younger children cannot be enrolled in the nursery and kindergarten, while for the parents of children from primary up to 16 years, penalties of up to 500 euros are foreseen - yet there were those who resisted.

Today is better. In 2020, notes the Higher Institute of Health, “in Italy 103 cases of measles were reported in twelve regions: 52 in January, 42 in February, 9 in March; no new cases have been reported since April ". In Sardinia no case, and it will also depend on anti Covid hygiene measures (lockdowns and masks that have also canceled the flu) but the credit goes to the increase in vaccination coverage: if in 2014 88 percent of children were immunized , now we have reached 93%, therefore two percentage points are missing from the 95% shield necessary, according to the WHO, to achieve herd immunity. In between we have a constant decrease in infections, from 100 cases in 2014 to 45 in 2017, to eight in '18 and '19.