I just read a fascinating suggestion that simple Vitamin A given to children can protect them against measles. Researchers at the Cochrane Institute, who studied 43 trials involving 215,633 children 6 months-5 years, say that it won’t prevent children catching measles, but it can help lower the life-threatening effects quite dramatically.
They discovered that vitamin A prevents deaths in children who catch measles and suffer from diarrhoea. Giving just the daily recommended dose seemed to reduce the risk of death by 24 per cent. Read more: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2010, issue 12, doi: 10.1002/14651858.CD008524,pub2 or a story on it here.