• Saki Takahashi, C Jessica E Metcalf, Matthew J Ferrari, William J Moss, Shaun A Truelove, Andrew J Tatem, Bryan T Grenfell, and Justin Lessler.
• Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.
• Science. 2015 Mar 13;347(6227):1240-2.

AbstractThe Ebola epidemic in West Africa has caused substantial morbidity and mortality. The outbreak has also disrupted health care services, including childhood vaccinations, creating a second public health crisis. We project that after 6 to 18 months of disruptions, a large connected cluster of children unvaccinated for measles will accumulate across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. This pool of susceptibility increases the expected size of a regional measles outbreak from 127,000 to 227,000 cases after 18 months, resulting in 2000 to 16,000 additional deaths (comparable to the numbers of Ebola deaths reported thus far). There is a clear path to avoiding outbreaks of childhood vaccine-preventable diseases once the threat of Ebola begins to recede: an aggressive regional vaccination campaign aimed at age groups left unprotected because of health care disruptions.Copyright © 2015, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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