Aftershock of a Vaccination Gap: The Measles Epidemics in Tirana, 2018

Abstract

Tirana, capital of Albania, has seen an acute increase in the measles cases during 2018, with a total figure surpassing 1000 of patients. The outbreak happened while the country was only witnessing very few and isolated cases for several years, as to have officially declared the disease as eradicated. Several reasons might have led to the outbreak of this epidemic, with a clear vaccination gap in the years 1997-1998. Authors discuss this undervaccination as well as other factors detectable in this group of patients, such as a peak in the first-year age infants and the prevalent distribution in the suburban area of the city, actually inhabited from a large number of internally migrated people. (JMIR Preprints 28/05/2021:30779) DOI: https://doi.org/10.2196/preprints.30779 Preprint Settings 1) Would you like to publish your submitted manuscript as preprint? Please make my preprint PDF available to anyone at any time (recommended). Please make my preprint PDF available only to logged-in users; I understand that my title and abstract will remain visible to all users. Only make the preprint title and abstract visible. No, I do not wish to publish my submitted manuscript as a preprint. 2) If accepted for publication in a JMIR journal, would you like the PDF to be visible to the public? Yes, please make my accepted manuscript PDF available to anyone at any time (Recommended). Yes, but please make my accepted manuscript PDF available only to logged-in users; I understand that the title and abstract will remain visible to all users (see Important note, above). I also understand that if I later pay to participate in JMIR’s PubMed Now! service service, my accepted manuscript PDF will automatically be made openly available. Yes, but only make the title and abstract visible (see Important note, above). I understand that if I later pay to participate in JMIR’s PubMed Now! service service, my accepted manuscript PDF will automatically be made openly available. https://preprints.jmir.org/preprint/30779 [unpublished, non-peer-reviewed preprint] JMIR Preprints Ulqinaku et al