A mass outbreak of measles in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg has been blamed by officials on the anti-vaccine movement, the RIA Novosti news site reported Friday
Twenty-four cases have so far been diagnosed in the city in 2016, despite the illness having previously almost disappeared from the region.
“This has not happened since the 1960s,” said the Mayor of Yekaterinburg, Yevgeny Roizman. “People began to massively abandon the principle of vaccination in the early 2000s, and this has yielded results. Now, we have 2090 children under 18 who are not vaccinated, creating the danger of an epidemic,” he told the FM City Radio Station.
Russian children are usually vaccinated against measles at 12 months and 6 years old.
