For millennia, measles had free rein to plague the world's children – particularly in the first few years of life – infecting nearly everyone before their 15th birthday. In 1967, the year before the vaccine was introduced in the UK, there were 460,407 suspected cases. When European colonists first made it across the Atlantic, the virus is thought to have been one of the new imports – along with others such as smallpox and typhoid – that wiped out 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas within a century.
