The writer is a science commentator
About three years ago, Princeton graduate student Amy Winter had an inspired idea. Children in Madagascar who turn up in clinics with a fever and rash usually have their blood taken to check for short-term infections like measles or rubella. Why not use those same blood samples to piece together a picture of immunity, rather than current infection?
In June 2018, Ms Winter and colleagues reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology that their “serosurvey” revealed a lower level of measles immunity than the WHO advocates, and concluded “that Madagascar is at risk of a serious measles outbreak”. The outbreak duly arrived that September, mushrooming into an epidemic infecting more than 100,000 people and killing around 1,200.