Webinar on “Algorithm on classification of suspected measles and rubella cases in the WHO South-East Asia region: recent updates”

Location: New Delhi, India (Virtual)

Date: 6 May 2025

Participants: More than 475 Public health professionals, clinicians, laboratory colleagues working on or interested in measles and rubella elimination participated. The participants represented 35 countries from five of the six WHO Regions including eleven countries from SEARO.

Purpose: The purpose of the webinar was to orient and enhance coordination among the immunization, surveillance and laboratory teams to identify true and false positive as well as negative cases of measles and rubella and streamline partner and stakeholders support towards acceleration of progress towards measles and rubella elimination.

Details: The WHO South-East Asia Region has resolved to eliminate measles and rubella by 2026 with verification of elimination by 2029. As of March 2025, four countries have eliminated measles, and five countries have eliminated rubella.

The remaining countries have low level transmission for both measles and rubella with incidence of less than 5 per million population putting the countries at near-elimination status. With reduced incidence of measles and rubella in SEARO , the positive predictive value of confirmatory tests for measles and rubella have decreased which is posing challenge in classifying suspected cases.

WHO SEARO developed a new algorithm with laboratory tests in addition to conventional tests to classify doubtful cases of IgM positive measles and rubella which need to be implemented.

Thus, this webinar was planned and provided answers to common queries, such as:

• What is vaccine associated measles and how to identify them?

• Why children with two or more doses of measles–rubella vaccines are still laboratory positive for measles or rubella?

• How to identify true positive cases of measles and rubella?

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Authors: WHO South-East Asia Regional Office

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(Photo- © WHO SEARO)