On 9 April New York City's mayor Bill de Blasio declared a public health emergency and launched a compulsory vaccination programme in Brooklyn, where at least 285 people have contracted measles since an outbreak began in the autumn. Most of those who have fallen ill are children who had not been vaccinated against a disease that once killed hundreds of Americans a year but that, following a decades-long vaccination programme, was declared eradicated in the US in 2000. The current outbreak is concentrated among the city's Orthodox Jewish community, but anxiety over immunisation is not confined to this group. In the US, the percentage of children aged under two who are completely unvaccinated has quadrupled since 2001.
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