Somalia has recorded 730 confirmed measles cases and 42 deaths, according to a continental table published on 9 August by Africa CDC, the African Union's health agency1. The same table puts Mozambique at 1,720 confirmed cases and two deaths, and Mali at 254 confirmed cases with none. Africa CDC is a distinct body from the US CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and it collects from ministries of health across the African Union's member states rather than from a single national system.
Read the Somali line slowly. Roughly one confirmed case in seventeen ended in death, in an outbreak a fortieth the size of Guatemala's. Guatemala and Mexico, whose counts we have tracked since PAHO's 17 June table, each lose fewer than two patients in every thousand confirmed cases. A case-fatality ratio that high in measles usually says less about the virus than about what surrounds it: malnutrition, no vitamin A, no oxygen for the pneumonia that kills most measles patients, and a surveillance system that only sees the children sick enough to reach a clinic. Mali's 254 cases with no deaths at all should be read the same way, as a statement about detection as much as about outcome.
