According to Opa (Pan American Health Organization) director Jarbas Barbosa, Brazil should restore its measles elimination certificate in the coming months.

Barbosa’s statement was made during a vaccination seminar at the National Academy of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro this Saturday (9).

According to Jarbas Barbosa, not a single case of measles was diagnosed in Brazil in a year – Photo: WHO/UN

“In Brazil, no new cases have been diagnosed for a year, which also allows us to have great hope that in the coming months the verification commission will be able to certify the country again,” Barbosa said.

Brazil received a measles elimination certificate in 2016 from the World Health Organization (WHO), but lost it in 2019 due to an outbreak.

The Americas were the first continent to receive a regional certificate of eradication, but outbreaks in Brazil and Venezuela, which also lost the document, in 2019 led to the suspension of regional certification in 2018, Barbosa said.

The PAHO Commission recently confirmed that Venezuela has interrupted transmission of the disease, leaving only Brazil before the continent can again be considered a measles-free region.

Measles vaccination coverage

Measles can be prevented by immunizing the population. Health Minister Nicia Trindade, who also participated in the workshop, said that since 2016, Brazil has been faced with the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, with disinformation campaigns causing the population to stop seeking immunization and vaccination coverage to fall.

However, she said preliminary data from the Ministry of Health, due to be released in the coming days, shows that vaccination coverage in the country has increased again this year.

“We are clear that there is a lot of work to be done,” Nishiya said. “We created the Health with Science platform as a government cross-ministerial strategy to educate the public and identify criminal misinformation and fake news practices.”

According to Jarbas Barbosa, governments around the world need to monitor and debunk anti-vaccine rumors on social media every day.

“Misinformation is on social media almost every day, so an annual outreach campaign doesn’t make a big difference. What we are trying to do is encourage countries to monitor social media on a daily basis to ensure that no rumors, rumors or misinformation are left unanswered because it is like a snowball that continues to grow. And without a doubt, this will cause people to lose confidence in the vaccine,” he said.

In addition to combating fake news, Barbosa said other measures need to be taken to increase vaccination coverage, such as increasing awareness among health care workers, monitoring vaccination coverage and expanding supply in some places.

The director refers, for example, to the difficulty of vaccinating children in aggressive areas of large cities. He stresses the need to extend the opening hours of vaccination centers to make it easier for workers to take their children for vaccinations. In this way, areas with low immunization can be avoided.

“We need to identify [a cobertura vacinal] area by area, rather than working with average city coverage. The average coverage of a city like Rio de Janeiro doesn’t tell us anything. An average may be sufficient, but in some areas we have very low coverage. So we need to have new systems, analyze data, identify barriers. [para a vacinação] and adopt strategies to overcome these barriers.”