Current vaccination policies may not be enough to achieve or maintain measles elimination in some countries, including the United States, according to researchers, who suggested that adding mandatory vaccination programs for children entering school could help countries achieve stable herd immunity and prevent future outbreaks.

Writing in BMC Medicine, Filippo Trentini, PhD, from the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Italy, and colleagues noted that the World Health Assembly set three milestones in 2010 with a goal of achieving measles eradication by 2015. These included increasing routine coverage with a first dose of measles-containing vaccine to more than 90% nationally, reducing the global annual incidence of measles to less than five cases per million and reducing global deaths from measles by 95% compared with 2000 estimates.