HX11 ‘I’ll be back’: the history of measles

Abstract

Measles is once again making headlines as the infectious viral illness. Measles was first discovered by the Persian chief physician Rhazes in the 9th century. Rhazes was the first to differentiate measles from smallpox and described eruptive fever, lack of ulceration and peeling helpful clues to differentiate it from smallpox. Between the 11th and 12th centuries several measles epidemics were reported in Europe. In the 17th century, Thomas Sydenham made the modern description of measles in 1693. The term measles was derived from Latin ‘misella’, a diminutive of misery. In 1757, Scottish physician Francis Home was inspired to prevent the disease by inoculating healthy children with infected blood of individuals with measles during the viraemia. However, he abandoned this experimentation due to poor outcomes. Dr Peter Panum studied the geography of measles and published the contagious nature of the disease. He identified that there was a 2-week incubation period after observing the Faroe Island epidemics in 1846. It was later Dr Henry Koplik in 1896 who described the mucosal sign of the Koplik spot that precedes the exanthem. In 1911 John Anderson and Joseph Goldberger showed that measles could be transmitted from infected bloods samples to rhesus monkey. During an epidemic Dr Thomas Peebles and John Enders collected nasopharyngeal and blood samples from an outbreak at an elementary school. Samples from an 11-year-old boy named David Edmonston in 1954 unlocked the development of the first live-attenuated vaccine known, as the Edmonston B strain. By 1963, the live attenuated measles vaccine was licensed in the USA. In 1968, Maurice Hillman’s team modified the vaccine further and later in 1971 combined the measles with the mumps and rubella vaccines to form the MMR vaccine. To this day the measles vaccine has saved countless lives and led to a significant drop in cases of measles around the world.