RAUCESTI: When epidemiologist Daniela Gafita makes her rounds in the remote villages of northeastern Romania to educate communities about the risks of measles, she frequently encounters parents who hesitate to have their children vaccinated.
With measles cases in Europe hitting a 25-year high last year, Romania was the country most affected: it recorded 13,000 of the approximately 18,000 cases registered between June 2024 and May 2025 in the European Economic Area, which includes EU members as well as Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.
But the disease has also re-emerged globally, with the United States confronting its worst epidemic in 30 years, in part fueled by anti-vaccine misinformation that has been circulating on social media since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite widespread vaccine skepticism in Romania, Gafita and her colleagues from the local health department are undeterred in their mission to spread the immunization message.
“We are trying to recover little by little what we lost” in the past decades when the situation was still at bay, said the 52-year-old.
