The number of registered cases of measles has been dropping in the past weeks, a doctor with Serbia’s leading public health institution said on national TV.

A total od 4,740 cases of measles were registered in the country since last October, with a third of those patients needing hospital treatment, epidemiologist Darija Kisic-Tepavcevic of the Batut Institute of Public Health told state broadcaster RTS.

She said there was a drop in the number of cases reported on a daily basis in the past few weeks. A total of 15 patients who contracted measles have died since the outbreak, with some medical experts putting blame for the deaths on the failure of parents to inoculate their children, out of fear of possible harmful effects caused by the vaccine.

An anti-inoculation campaign has been underway in Serbia for some time. Kisic-Tepavcevic said that only the people who were not inoculated at all or were partially inoculated had died or suffered serious complications after contracting measles. She said the number of inoculated children had been on the rise since the measles epidemic broke out last year, adding that the number of doses of the vaccine used this winter was double the amount used in the same period a year earlier.