[Clinical and serologic diagnosis of measles in children vaccinated against the disease]

At the period of mass immunization of children with live measles vaccine clinical symptoms of measles, their intensity and sequence apparently displayed some changes; therefore, serological diagnosis is more reliable in comparison with the clinical one. Result of serological study of 93 coupled blood sera of children who fell sick with the diagnosis of measles showed that only 54.3% of those vaccinated earlier and 49.2% of nonvaccinated children sustained measles, whereas the rest had had exanthematous disease of other etiology. All the children had fever (the majority not over 38.5 degrees C) and rash; other clinical signs of measles were of different intensity in the vaccinated and nonvaccinated children. Apparently such pathognomonic signs of measles as rash, Filatov's sports and conjunctivitis could not serve at present as a reliable criterion of clinical measles diagnosis. The majority of children vaccinated before who contracted the disease responded to the infection by an earlier and more intensive production of antibodies than nonvaccinated children who contracted the disease, this pointing to the possibility of manifestation in them of the clinically expressed booster-effect. The data obtained indicated a marked difficulty of clinical differential diagnosis of measles.