Werra Maulu Botey could not bear to close his daughter’s coffin. Waiting to bury herlucky time, he slid the rough wooden lid back, again and again, to adjust her small head and smooth the cloth that cradled it away from her cheeks.
Olive died of measles, at the age of 5, the evening before. She was the first child to die that weekend in an emergency measles treatment center in the town of Bikoro, in the northwest Democratic Republic of Congo. The second was her cousin, a 1-year-old girl.
Measles is sweeping through the children of Bikoro, as it does every couple of years, creeping, then flaring, across this vast country.
pulse slotsIt is on the rise in other parts of the world, too — including in some communities in the United States — though the measles vaccine has been in use since 1963 and is believed to have saved more lives than any other childhood immunization.
There were more than 311,000 reported cases of measles in Congo last year. Some 6,000 of them ended as Olive’s did: with a child buried in a small coffin days after first running a fever and breaking out in a red rash. This year, cases have been fewer — about 97,000 — but the virus has become more lethal, killing more than 2,100. It’s not clear why.
Globally, there were 20 percent more measles cases in 2023 than in the year before, according to the World Health Organization, for a total of 10.3 million, and more than 107,000 people died. Fifty-seven countries had “large or disruptive” outbreaks, the W.H.O. said, nearly 60 percent more than in 2022.
But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.
His debunked claims about Haitian migrants stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio, helped stir a firestorm over immigration in that community, which has dealt with bomb threats and evacuations after Mr. Trump made his comments.
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