AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine hesitancy are not the only causes of the increase in measles cases in low- and middle-income countries. Measles epidemics, like the recent one in eastern DRC, are often quickly halted by mass vaccination in 'easy to reach' refugee camps. However, governmental and humanitarian actors fail to respond effectively in 'hard-to-reach' areas like Masisi, frequently limiting themselves to more accessible areas close to big cities.
This project has received funding from the Covid-19-Fund KU Leuven / University Hospitals Leuven, the COVID-19 call of the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) (grant G0G4820N), the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant 101,003,627, Swift COronavirus therapeutics REsponse project) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Grant INV-00,636). LLi is member of the Institute of Tropical Medicine's Outbreak Research Team which is financially supported by the Department of Economy, Science and Innovation (EWI) of the Flemish government. BV is supported by a research grant of the Frans Van de Werf Fund for Clinical Cardiovascular Research. P. Verhamme, TV, P. Vermeersch are senior clinical investigators of the FWO. We thank Johnson & Johnson for determining drug concentrations in hamster samples and for providing. guidance on the dosing. We thank Lindsey Bervoets, Carolien De Keyzer, Elke Maas and Jasper Rymentants for the technical support with the animal experiments. TNDD is funded by the Horizon 2020 grant OrganoVIR 812,673 on the project 'Organoids for Virus Research - An innovative training-ITN programme'. XW and XZ received funding of the China Scholarship Council (CSC) (grant number 201,806,170,087 and 201,906,170,033). Part of this research work was performed using the 'Caps-It' research infrastructure (project ZW13 02) that was financially supported by the Hercules Foundation (FWO) and Rega Foundation, KU Leuven.
