Diphtheria, a vaccine-preventable infection rarely seen in many parts of the world, is making a comeback in Ukraine.
In October, there have already been 18 cases of the potentially fatal illness, which causes fever, swollen glands in the neck, difficulty breathing and even toxic shock and damage to the nervous system and heart.
According to the Kyiv City Public Health Center, 50 out of 1000 cases of diphtheria end in death.
This year Ukraine has already seen more cases of diphtheria than in all of 2018.
Last year, Ukraine had 10 diphtheria cases — giving it a relatively high ranking of 21st out of 195 countries, according to the World Health Organization.
The country recorded its first case of the highly contagious disease on Oct. 8 in Uzhgorod, a city of 115,000 people located 740 kilometers to the southwest of Kyiv. It was also the first case of the disease in Zakarpattia Oblast in nine years.
The patient was a medical student from India studying at Uzhgorod National University. Within a week, three more students from the same university were hospitalized with the disease.
Currently, there are 15 students who have been hospitalized with diphtheria. All are from India.
Only 27% of adults are vaccinated against diphtheria in Ukraine, is the clear cause of the outbreak according to the university’s rector, Volodymyr Smolanka. At least 90% of a population must be vaccinated to create a barrier to a disease’s spread, referred to as herd immunity.
“In India, there are 1,000 cases per 1.3 billion people, which means one case per 130 million. And in Ukraine, last year alone there were 10 cases per 40 million,” Smolanka said during a briefing on Oct.25 in Uzhgorod.
In 2018, India saw 8,788 cases of diphtheria according to the World Health Organization.
On Oct. 26, in Ukraine’s western Ternopil Oblast, doctors diagnosed diphtheria in a 47-year-old male patient, the Ministry of Health reported.
The two most recent cases were identified in Kyiv: a 9-year-old boy and a 35-year-old woman diagnosed on Oct. 22 and Oct. 27, respectively.
According to Vasyl Zhyvoteniuk, head of the department of primary health care at the Kyiv City State Administration, the average vaccination rate in Kyiv is 77%, which is relatively high but still not enough to create herd immunity.
Moreover, in the case of the 9-year-old boy, his parents had repeatedly refused to have him vaccinated, according to Yuriy Smishchuk, chief medical officer at the Center for Primary Health Care in Kyiv’s Darnytsia District.
“This is parental ignorance,” Zhyvoteniuk said during a press briefing on Oct. 25.
While young doctors in Ukraine only know of diphtheria from medical textbooks, the growing risk of an epidemic recalls the widespread rejection of vaccines in the 1990s that led 20,000 Ukrainians to catch diphtheria and caused 696 deaths between 1991 and 1998, according to the Ministry of Health.
“Today I’m most afraid of diphtheria — literally every day…,” said Yevhen Komarovskiy, a pediatrician and author of the popular book “A Child’s Health and Parents’ Common Sense,” back in 2017 in an interview with 112 Channel. “It’s just going to be a disaster.”
