Measles, Italy first in the European Union for number of cases

Between September 2025 and August 2026, Italy recorded 653 cases of measles, the highest number among all European Union and European Economic Area countries. This is certified by the monthly report of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the EU agency that monitors infectious diseases across the continent.

The figure places Italy ahead of Bulgaria, Romania, Spain and France for the overall number of infections in the period considered. Italian cases represent 28% of the total recorded across Europe, a share that alone exceeds a quarter of all infections reported in the EU/EEA area.

Measles is a highly contagious viral disease, preventable through vaccination with the MMR trivalent vaccine (measles, mumps, rubella), administered in two doses. European health authorities reiterate in the report the need to reach and maintain vaccination coverage above 95% with both doses in order to break the chain of transmission of the virus at population level. This is the threshold considered necessary to guarantee what epidemiologists call herd immunity, below which the virus finds pockets of susceptible population sufficient to sustain outbreaks.

Italy’s position at the top of the European ranking indicates that the country has not reached, or does not uniformly maintain across its territory, this coverage threshold. The ECDC report does not go into detail on the specific causes of the Italian situation, but the link between insufficient vaccination coverage and virus circulation is the common thread through which the European agency frames the continent’s data.

The comparison with the other large EU countries is useful for contextualising the figure. Bulgaria, Romania, Spain and France follow Italy in absolute number of cases, but none of these countries reaches Italy’s share. This is a picture concerning the European Union and the European Economic Area as a whole: the ECDC report notes that the total number of European cases in the period considered remains high, with Italy as the main single contributor.

The relevance of the figure lies in the very nature of measles as a public health indicator. Unlike many other infectious diseases, measles requires particularly high vaccination coverage thresholds to be kept under control, precisely because of the virus’s high contagiousness. A number of cases such as Italy’s therefore signals, according to the ECDC’s own reading of its data, coverage not yet aligned with the targets set at European level.

The ECDC’s monthly report is based on epidemiological surveillance conducted by national health systems, which send surveillance data to the European agency according to shared protocols. This mechanism allows comparison between countries on a homogeneous basis, and it is the same mechanism that establishes that Italy precedes Bulgaria, Romania, Spain and France in overall number of infections in the period monitored.

The European picture described by the ECDC therefore places Italy in a position requiring attention on the front of vaccination coverage, a matter on which national and European health authorities continue to collect and publish data on a monthly basis.