While much of the world’s attention is on battling the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now reached many countries in Africa, measles continues to silently kill large numbers of mostly children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic (CAR) and Chad. DRC – which has also been fighting an Ebola epidemic – declared a measles outbreak in June 2019. Chad’s measles outbreak has been raging for two years, since May 2018. CAR declared its measles outbreak in January this year.

Together, the outbreaks have infected hundreds of thousands of children and killed thousands more. Some kids die at home, never having reached proper medical care, or having been seen only by a traditional healer.

In medical school we are given the impression that infectious diseases, while scary, are something we can handle with the right tools.

The thought of facing them without treatments or vaccines available never crossed my mind, but if it had, it would have been terrifying.

Yet, this was exactly what our teams faced when we responded to the 2014–16 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa which killed more than 11,000 people.