By Gamal Fahnbulleh, Sky News Reporter
A national catch-up programme to increase MMR vaccination uptake in children and teenagers has been announced.
The aim is to prevent measles outbreaks by vaccinating as many unvaccinated and partially vaccinated 10 to 16 year olds as possible in time for the next school year.
There were 587 confirmed measles cases in England in the first three months of this year, a figure that comes after a record high of 2000 cases last year.
Experts believe around 330,000 children aged 10 to 16 years of this age group remain unvaccinated.
Mairead Flavin is a nurse at a GP surgery in Middlesex. She has seen an increase in the number of parents getting their children vaccinated and believes the message is getting through.
"It's more standard practice now. Back in the day it wasn't. You had to do a lot of convincing and had to try to encourage parents to vaccinate their children. At this moment in time I think they're very anxious to have it done."
Experts believe the rise in Measles cases can be mostly attributed to the proportion of unprotected 10-16 year olds who missed out on vaccination in the late 1990s and early 2000s when concern around the discredited link between autism and the vaccine was widespread.
Professor David Salisbury, Director of immunisation at the Department of Health, said: "At the moment the hotspots in particular are in the North East and North West.
"That's quite different from where the vulnerability is and the vulnerability is all over the country. London is a real risk but we must be sure that any child anywhere in the country who has not had two doses of MMR gets vaccinated."
Dr Paul Cosford, Director for Health Protection at PHE, said " We believe this national framework for a catch-up programme sets out an appropriate response to the situation in England, using the range of expertise and skills across the new public health system.
"Although nationally the numbers needing catch-up vaccination is quite large, the are relatively few in each local area.
"We are confident that local teams have the resources to identify and vaccinate those children most at risk, and the NHS has sufficient vaccine to cover the approaches described in the action plan."
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