Child dies of measles in Nijmegen hospital; First since 2019

Despite the fact that measles is almost non-existent in the Netherlands, a girl died of the virus in Radboudumc in Nijmegen in March. That is the first measles death in the Netherlands since 2019, medical microbiologist Matthew McCall of Radboud university medical center told De Gelderlander.

McCall couldn’t say how and where the girl contracted measles for privacy reasons. But in general, there are two steps by which the disease occasionally reappears in the Netherlands, he said. “As long as there are communities where vaccination is not, or not widely practiced, outbreaks will occur every few years in those communities,” he said. If enough people are susceptible, the measles virus can spread. The virus is usually brought back to the Netherlands by someone who contracted it abroad.

According to McCall, there is a measles outbreak in the Netherlands once every four to eight years. On average, the disease is found ten to twenty times a year, according to the health institute RIVM. The chance of dying from measles in the Netherlands is 1 in 10,000.

The problem with measles is that the immune system can go haywire and attack the body’s own brain cells, even many years later. “All that time, a little bit of the virus had been ‘hiding’ deep in the brain tissue and then still spreads,” McCall said.

That happened with the previous measles death in 2019. The child contracted measles during the major outbreak in the Netherlands in 2013-2014, when there were 2,700 measles cases. At the time, 180 people were hospitalized, and one girl died. Later, there were two more deaths that could be traced back to the outbreak years earlier, McCall said. The last one was in 2019.

Measles is transmitted through coughing and sneezing that release small droplets continuing the virus into the air. People who breathe in these droplets can become infected. The disease is very contagious.

According to the RIVM, the first symptoms are often fever, feeling unwell, cold-like symptoms, a cough, inflamed eyes, and small white spots in the mouth. After three to seven days, spots appear behind the ears and then spread over the entire body. Usually, the symptoms go away on their own.