Journal of Preventive Medicine

Measles virus: A focus on a selected northen Italy population. Between emergency unit access and immune status of hospital staff, where is the balance during 2017 epidemia?

9^th Edition of International Conference on Preventive Medicine & Public Health
July 16-17, 2018 London, UK

M Monari, P Bianchi, M Motta, F Maura, B Barbieri, E Azzolini, M Pedretti and L Ferretti

Istituto Clinico Humanitas - IRCCS, Italy

ScientificTracks Abstracts: J Prev Med

DOI: 10.21767/2572-5483-C1-002

Abstract

Measles is targeted for elimination in Italy as in Word Health Organization (WHO), but our country remains one of the 14 endemic countries in WHO European Region. In 2017, Italy showed an unexpected increase of measles cases in comparison of previous years. Two circulars were promptly issued by national authorities to warn all regions: the first was intended to recall recommendations on control measures, the second one gave more specific guidelines regarding the immunoglobulin administration. The aim of this work is to investigate the seroprevalence and the immunity status in health workers (PM) of our hospital in order to prevent new possible infections during the work in the emergency units (EU). We focused our attention on the first ten months of 2017. We determined the immunity or susceptibility of our medical and nurse staff through preventive medicine tests and we recorded all the suspected and confirmed cases of positive measles IgM admitted to the emergency unit. In EU we observed 73 suspected cases. Among them 36.98% (27 cases) were immune (both women and men), while 10% of women (8) and 15.1% of men (11) were not immune. Among these cases 13 had positive IgM at the access: 3 women (4.1%) with a median age of 31.33 yrs and 11 men (15%) with a median age of 32.54 yrs. None of the 40 workers who came into contact with these 13 cases contracted measles. Strengthening surveillance and immunization coverage was the key to this successful result.

Biography

M Monari is the Director of Clinical Laboratory Analysis of Humanitas Research Hospital and she is a contract Professor of two Italian University: Humanitas University and Insubria University in Nurse degrees. She develops, in according with the hospital direction, different investigation studies around topics of health and security of blood collections and datas communications. She has more than 45 poster published and 23 articles. She was Editorial Board member for the Journal of Women’s Health and Reproductive Medicine. She was also Cheif Director or several courses and congress and speaker to them. E-mail:

marta_noemi.monari@humanitas.it