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Geneva: The World Health Organization expressed alarm on Tuesday over the rapid spread of measles, with more than 306,000 cases reported worldwide last year, a 79 percent increase from 2022.

“In the measles world we are extremely concerned,” said Natasha Crowcroft, WHO technical advisor on measles and rubella.

However, he stressed that measles cases are generally largely underreported and that the real number was almost certainly much higher.

To get more accurate figures, the UN health agency models the figures each year, and its latest estimate indicates that there were 9.2 million cases and 136,216 deaths from measles in 2022.

This modeling has not yet been done for last year, but Crowcroft noted that 2022 had already seen a 43 percent increase in deaths from the previous year.

Given the rising number of cases, “we expect an increase in deaths also in 2023,” he told reporters in Geneva, via video link from Cairo.

“This year is going to be a big challenge.”

He warned that more than half of all countries in the world are currently believed to be at high risk of measles outbreaks before the end of the year.

And it is estimated that some 142 million children are susceptible to getting sick.

Measles is a highly contagious disease caused by a virus that mainly attacks children. More serious complications include blindness, swelling of the brain, diarrhea, and severe respiratory infections.

One of the main causes of the increase in numbers is the “decline in vaccination coverage,” Crowcroft said.

At least 95 percent of children must be fully vaccinated against the disease in a locality to prevent outbreaks, but global vaccination rates have fallen to 83 percent.

There is a lot of inequity in the distribution of cases, and even more so when it comes to deaths.

Crowcroft noted that 92 percent of all children who die from measles live among less than a quarter of the world’s population, mostly in very low-income countries.