What are the symptoms of Measles?
Measles is the most serious of the three diseases. It is a highly infectious illness. Common symptoms include: fever; rash; ear infections; diarrhoea; runny nose; loss of appetite; cough; and red painful eyes. Children who get measles usually have to spend about 5 days in bed and have 10-14 days off school, if there are no serious complications. Serious complications include: pneumonia; hospitalisation; convulsions or fits; inflammation of the brain (encephalitis); and subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a late complication of measles, which causes progressive brain damage and is always fatal. Even in countries such as Australia, previously healthy children can still die from measles especially if they catch measles when they are very young. In the 1993–4 measles outbreak in Australia, four children died from measles.1 In 2001 the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that there were 745,000 deaths worldwide from measles.
