The spread of measles in Fiji and the Pacific : spatial components in the transmission of epidemic waves through island communities

Abstract

Small islands provide, as Charles Darwin obserrved, remarkable field laboratories for many biological studies. This generalisation is nowhere truer than in the Pacific. The introduction of the measles virus into the populations of the Pacific in the second half of the 19th century provides a dramatic example of the demographic impact of disease and has been much studied . In this paper, we confine ourselves to t he less - studied geographical aspects of that spread.