• IT’S always saddening to read a letter influenced by pernicious anti-vaccine propaganda, and even more so when it’s written by a retired nurse, whom one would expect to know better, (There is much evidence of the side effects of vaccination, April 18).

Yes, as Jane Dean says, measles was virtually eliminated in the USA by the year 2000; but so far this year 465 cases have occurred across 19 states, and these were all in children who hadn’t been vaccinated.

In Europe no less than 83,000 cases of measles occurred last year, triple the previous year’s total, again in families regrettably deluded by anti-vax rumours.

And in the Democratic Republic of Congo a new outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus is spreading fast and has already killed 751 people, as villagers influenced by the anti-vaccine myth have been hiding from World Health Organisation vaccination teams, while Ebola treatment centres have suffered firebomb attacks.

An excellent article in last Sunday’s Observer by medical historian Mark Honigsbaum (As Ebola kills in Africa, in the west lies over vaccines beguile the complacent) lucidly sets out the facts.

I’d recommend it to Jane Dean and to anyone else who may have been worried by what they’ve heard about the illusory perils of vaccination.

PHILIP KEMP
Jeffreys Street, NW1