Wang Yuanyuan

SHENZHEN children aged 8 months to 6 years, including the children of expats, have been urged by the health authorities to get free measles shots at hospitals or community clinics in the city.

The municipal health bureau will check students’ inoculation certificates from March to September to ensure that more than 95 percent of children have received the shots. Private schools, which have large concentrations of children of migrants and foreigners, will be a focus of the mass vaccination program.

An increasing number of children have been contracting measles in recent years, officials with the city’s center for disease control and prevention (CDC) said yesterday. There were a total of 752 reported cases of measles in the city from January to March this year, 54.7 percent more than the same period last year. In 2007, the city saw a 131-percent increase in the number of measles cases compared to the year before that, the largest number in Guangdong Province.

Measles is an infectious disease of the respiratory tract, which usually breaks out in winter and spring. Common symptoms include fever, red eyes, coughing and skin eruptions. Some cases result in heart failure, paralysis, epilepsy and mental retardation.

Foreign residents can take their children to 424 community clinics and hospitals across the city to get inoculated. “There should be no worry about the drugs and health securities problems, as all the process and drugs in these places are up to international medical treatment standards,” Dang Jiao with the CDC said yesterday.