Origins
Where did Measles come from?
Measles most likely originated around 3000 BC in the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. By the middle ages measles was fully established throughout the old world. It was in this time that physicians started to recognize and describe the disease using the term “mesles” which had also been used to describe the lesions from leprosy. The earliest reference that can be confirmed to be about measles was from a Persian physician from near modern day Tehran, where he suggested fever might be the body's natural defense and described measles and smallpox and how to differentiate them.
Developments
How did Measles change as time went on?
The contagious nature was first discovered by Francis Home a Scottish physician, who while attempting to inoculate for measles taking blood from infected patients on cotton balls, placed the cotton balls into slices in the arms of 12 children, and 10 of the children became infected with measles.
In general measles was viewed as a moderately mild disease that killed mostly children, however, during the columbian exchange when measles was brought to the new world, in cuba for instance it wiped out 2 ⁄ 3 of the population and was the leading cause of death in many places in the caribbean islands and central american regions. Mortality rate after Francisco Pizarro brought measles to Nicaragua and then Peru spreading it through South America, at the beginning was around 60% slowly creeping down to around 16% when populations started to become immune.
In the beginning of the 20th century a man named Peter Ludwig Panum started to lay out our knowledge of measles today by tracking an epidemic in the Faroe Islands that had never previously been exposed, where 77% of the population would become infected. The Fiji epidemic of 1875, brought over from Australia by Fiji's king after signing it over to Britain, killed up to ¼ of the population at the time.
Vaccine
How did we develop the Measles vaccine?
In 1954, John F. Enders and Dr. Thomas C. Peebles collected blood samples from several ill students during a measles outbreak in Boston, Massachusetts. They wanted to isolate the measles virus in the student’s blood and create a measles vaccine. They succeeded in isolating measles in 13-year-old David Edmonston’s blood. Within 6 years a vaccine was available to test and was tested on 1500 developmentally delayed children in NYC and 4000 Nigerian children. The vaccine was deemed successful and within 2 years of the start of a mass vaccination campaign 10 million doses of the vaccine were administered.
The year before the vaccine was introduced there were 481,000 cases of measles, within 4 years this had dropped by more than half and by 1968 there were only 22,000 cases in the US. Vaccination rates did briefly decline after funding moved to focus on vaccination efforts of Rubella but this was quickly solved by combining them into the MMR (Measles, Mumps, and Rubella) vaccine. Measles was declared eliminated in the US in the year 2000.