LAUSR

Background: Measles is endemic in Somalia; recurrent outbreaks are reported annually. Under-five children are the most affected due to low immunization coverage, vitamin A deficiency, and malnutrition. The study aims to evaluate the demographical, clinical, and complication variations between vaccinated and unvaccinated hospitalized children with measles in the study hospital. Method: A hospital-based retrospective cohort study was implemented between 10 October and 10 November 2022 by reviewing case record files following a well-structured checklist of admitted clinical features, demographic characteristics, history of measles immunization, and measles complication status. Descriptive statistics were used by presenting frequency and percentage for categorical and the mean score for continuous variables. χ2 and Fisher’s exact test at P =0.05 were used to identify the proportions differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated cases. Result: A total of 93 hospitalized measles children participated in the study. Over half were boys, the mean age in months was 20.9 (SD±7.28), and over two-thirds of the mothers/caregivers did not have formal education. Almost 9.7% of hospitalized measles children had one dose of the measles-containing vaccine, while none had two doses. The vaccinated cases had fewer ill with fewer complications than the unvaccinated cases. Fever, cough, rash, and Koplik’s spots were clinical features associated with measles immunization status. Conclusion: Around one in ten hospitalized children had one dose of the measles vaccine. Vaccinated cases had fewer illnesses with few complications than unvaccinated cases. The paper highly emphasizes providing booster doses, improving vaccine logistics and storage, and following immunization schedules. In addition, conducting further multicentral high sample-size studies is highly required to identify whether vaccine inadequacy was due to host-related or vaccine-related factors.