The map of this year's measles outbreaks looks nothing like the map of European poverty. The clusters are in well-off districts of Amsterdam, Munich, Lyon and Milan, among families with the means and the access to vaccinate and the conviction not to.
Public health agencies have recorded more than 9,000 cases across the European Union this year, the most since 2019. Vaccination coverage in several of the affected districts has fallen to 85 percent, below the 95 percent needed to stop the virus circulating.
The reasons, doctors say, are not new: a generation of parents who have never seen the disease, a steady supply of misinformation, and family physicians who are reluctant to press.
“The parents I see are not uninformed,” said Dr. Marta Visconti, a pediatrician in Milan. “They have read a great deal. That is the problem.”
Several countries are considering school-entry requirements of the kind long used in the United States. Others are betting on persuasion.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 11 of the European edition with the headline: Why Measles Is Back in Some of Europe's Richest Cities.
