Two years later, measles was responsible for the deaths of half the population of Honduras, and it has ravaged Mexico, Central America, and the Inca civilization.Between roughly 1855 and 2005, measles is estimated to have killed about 200 million people worldwide.The 1846 measles outbreak in the Faroe Islands was unusual for being well-studied. Measles had not been seen on the islands for 60 years, so almost no residents had any acquired immunity. Three-quarters of the residents got sick, and more than 100 (1–2%) died from it before the epidemic burned itself out. Peter Ludvig Panum observed the outbreak and determined that measles was spread through direct contact of contagious people with people who had never had measles.Measles killed 20 percent of Hawaiis population in the 1850s. In 1875, measles killed over 40,000 Fijians, approximately one-third of the population. In the 19th century, the disease killed more than half of the Great Andamanese population. Seven to eight million children are thought to have died from measles each year before the vaccine was introduced.In 1914, a statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company estimated from a survey of 22 countries that 1% of all deaths in the temperate zone were caused by measles. He observed also that 1–6% of cases of measles ended fatally, the difference depending on age (0–3 being the worst), social conditions (e.g. overcrowded tenements) and pre-existing health conditions.In 1954, the virus causing the disease was isolated from a 13-year-old boy from the United States, David Edmonston, and adapted and propagated on chick embryo tissue culture.
Even in countries where vaccination has been introduced, rates may remain high. Measles is a leading cause of vaccine-preventable childhood mortality. Worldwide, the fatality rate has been significantly reduced by a vaccination campaign led by partners in the Measles Initiative: the American Red Cross, the United States CDC, the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF and the WHO. Globally, measles fell 60% from an estimated 873,000 deaths in 1999 to 345,000 in 2005. Estimates for 2008 indicate deaths fell further to 164,000 globally, with 77% of the remaining measles deaths in 2008 occurring within the Southeast Asian region. There were 142,300 measles related deaths globally in 2018, of which most cases were reported from African and eastern Mediterranean regions. These estimates were slightly higher than that of 2017, when 124,000 deaths were reported due to measles infection globally.In 2000, the WHO established the Global Measles and Rubella Laboratory Network (GMRLN) to provide laboratory surveillance for measles, rubella, and congenital rubella syndrome. Data from 2016 to 2018 show that the most frequently detected measles virus genotypes are decreasing, suggesting that increasing global population immunity has decreased the number of chains of transmission.Cases reported in the first three months of 2019, were 300% higher than in the first three months of 2018, with outbreaks in every region of the world, even in countries with high overall vaccination coverage where it spread among clusters of unvaccinated people.