Over the past year, I have watched many children die of measles.
In the final stages, little lungs, filled with fluid and racked with inflammation, struggle for oxygen. The victims breathe faster and faster, gasping for air until, exhausted, they stop.
Where I live, in one of the poorest places on earth, measles kills thousands of children a year. It’s a grim lesson about a disease that should have been eradicated years ago. And it’s a grave warning against assuming “it can’t happen here” in more fortunate countries like the U.S., where the disease is making a comeback as parents fail to take the disease seriously. For years, U.S. pediatricians have gone their entire careers without seeing a case of measles, much less a death. Now, I fear, that may change.