With Shabbat over, Sundays in Stamford Hill are gleefully chaotic. As I climb a short, steep stretch of road, three young children bomb past on little blue scooters, the driving rain doing little to dampen the mood.
Turn towards the vaccination clinic, however, and the noise recedes. It’s easy to walk past, blissfully unaware of the crisis unfolding on these streets.
Over the past three years, measles has been quietly reestablishing itself in the UK, fuelled by a renewed reluctance among parents to vaccinate their children. Earlier this month, a child died of the virus at Alder Hey hospital in Liverpool — the second such death in five years. But in truth, that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Since January, there have been 529 laboratory-confirmed cases of measles in England, a figure that excludes the many unconfirmed ones. Government data shows that over half of all local authorities have reported at least one case — none more so than the City of Bristol, with 47. But adjusted for population size, it is the London borough of Hackney that stands out, with 46 cases so far this year — 22 of them in June alone. That translates to 1.64 cases per 10,000 residents, compared with 0.97 in Bristol.
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