All Stories: Samoa

Samoa batter Darius Visser broke the record for scoring the most runs in an over during the ICC T20 World Cup East Asia-Pacific Region...

Samoa’s island population of just 200,000 has been gripped by the highly infectious disease that has killed 81 people, most of them babies and young children, and infected more than 5,600 people.

Samoa entered a two-day lockdown Thursday to carry out an unprecedented mass vaccination drive aimed at containing a devastating measles epidemic that has killed dozens of children in the Pacific island nation.

The government said almost 200 new measles cases had been recorded since Sunday, with the rate of infection showing no sign of slowing despite a compulsory mass vaccination programme

Samoa has become vulnerable to measles outbreaks as the number of people becoming immunized has declined with the World Health Organisation (WHO) saying vaccine coverage is just about 31%.

Official government figures showed there had been one additional fatality since Tuesday, although the number of new measles cases climbed by 249 to 2,686 over the same period.