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 The milestone was confirmed after no cases of the highly contagious
disease originating in the Americas were recorded in at least three
years, the PAHO said.
"This is truly a historic deed," said Carissa Etienne, director of
the PAHO, which serves as the World Health Organization's (WHO)
regional office for the Americas.
Globally, measles remains a leading cause of death among young
children in the developing world.
About 250,000 people were infected with measles last year, most in
Africa and Asia, the PAHO said.
According to the WHO, the virus that can lead to deadly
complications like diarrhea, dehydration, respiratory infection and
encephalitis kills an estimated 314 people every day.
The last outbreak of measles that originated in the Americas
occurred in Venezuela in 2002, PAHO said.
But the region was only declared free of measles this year.
Factors such as conflicts that made it difficult to access some
communities slowed down the verification process, said Merceline
Dahl-Regis, chair of a committee of experts responsible for
verifying the elimination of measles and other diseases in the
Americas.
Justin Lessler, an epidemiology expert at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said imported cases
of measles - which remains widespread in other parts of the world -
could still lead to small outbreaks in the Americas.
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"People still need to be vaccinated to maintain elimination," he
said.
Before a separate, worldwide vaccination drive against measles began
in the 1980s, the disease caused 2.6 million deaths a year worldwide
- 12,000 of them in the Americas, according to PAHO.
Measles is the fifth vaccine-preventable disease to be eliminated in
the Americas - after smallpox in 1971, poliomyelitis in 1994, and
rubella and congenital rubella syndrome in 2015, the PAHO said.
(Reporting by Sebastien Malo, Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please
credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson
Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking,
property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)
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