Measles cases have spiked by as much as 30 per cent last year in some countries because of poor vaccination coverage, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday.

New data from the UN health agency indicates that outbreaks in the Americas, the European and eastern Mediterranean regions, contributed to a total of 110,000 deaths from the disease in 2017.

Despite this, there has been significant progress in eradicating this devastating but preventable illness since the turn of the century, with an estimated 21 million lives saved, WHO’s Dr Ann Lindstrand told UN News’s Sarah Mbengue.