[Measles. Meeting with a global health problem]

The present study compares children with measles with children with other diagnoses who were admitted to a small local hospital in Angola in the year of 1988. No differences were observed in the distributions of sex, age or lethality. Nor were any differences found between the children who died from measles and the ones who survived. The children who died from measles did so during the first days after admission. The fact that no significant differences were found shows that measles in this population affected an average of the child population. This underlines the severity of measles as a threat to the health of children in developing countries.