Led by experts from Sheba Medical Center, the team of six nurses, two pediatricians, and one physiotherapist is expected to arrive at the island on Monday in a deployment requested by the World Health Organization.

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Announcing the move Friday on Twitter, the Israeli ambassador said Jerusalem would not abandon its "dear friend" Samoa in the face of the crisis.

With dozens, mostly children, already dead, the disease is estimated to have affected more than 4,400 people in the 200,000-strong nation.

The outbreak is blamed on the so-called "anti-vaxxers" – those vocal and outspoken against vaccination against measles and other diseases due to its supposed danger.

Their push aimed to prevent parents from having their small children immunized and could have played a role in the outbreak of the disease as infants are most vulnerable to it.

Under the emergency rules imposed amid the outbreak, the Samoan government is now cracking down on the "anti-vaxxer" propaganda, with a social media campaigner recently arrested over spreading it, and could be facing up to two years in jail.

This article was originally published by i24NEWS.

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The 43-year-old woman, who was not named, was hospitalized soon after she was diagnosed with the disease about five months ago. She remained in critical condition and in an induced coma. Over the past several days her situation worsened due to septic shock and she died on Tuesday.

According to officials of the Israeli carrier, she was infected due to a sick passenger on the flight, even though she had been vaccinated in the past. Following the diagnosis, all the other passengers who were on the flight were screened for the disease, and some were administered the vaccine.

"We mourn the loss of our crew member," El Al said in a statement Tuesday. "El Al will continue to comply with the Health Ministry's regulation. We send our heartfelt condolences to the family and will continue to help them in this tragedy."

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The Democrat-led Senate and State Assembly voted Thursday to repeal the exemption, which allows parents to cite religious beliefs to forego getting their child the vaccines required for school enrollment.

The majority of cases are from outbreaks in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York.

In April, the New York City Health Department ordered all ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in a neighborhood of Brooklyn to exclude unvaccinated students from classes during the current measles outbreak.

In issuing the order, the health department said any yeshiva in Williamsburg that does not comply would face fines and possible closure.

City health officials said the measles outbreak among Orthodox Jewish communities continues to increase "at an alarming rate."

Most of the cases confirmed in New York City since the beginning of the outbreak in October have been reported in Williamsburg and Borough Park – two Brooklyn neighborhoods with large Jewish Orthodox populations, in which vaccination rates tend to be lower.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, signed the measure minutes after the final vote. The law takes effect immediately but will give unvaccinated students up to 30 days after they enter a school to show they've had the first dose of each required immunization.

The issue is hotly contested and debate around it has often been emotional, pitting cries that religious freedom is being curtailed against warnings that public health is being endangered. After the vote in the Assembly, many of those watching from the gallery erupted in cries of "Shame!" One woman yelled obscenities to the lawmakers seated below.

The debate has only intensified with this year's measles outbreak, which federal officials have said has recently surpassed 1,000 cases, the highest in 27 years.

"I'm not aware of anything in the Torah, the Bible, the Koran or anything else that suggests you should not get vaccinated," said Bronx Democrat Jeffrey Dinowitz, the bill's Assembly sponsor. "If you choose to not vaccinate your child, therefore potentially endangering other children ... then you're the one choosing not to send your children to school."

Hundreds of parents of unvaccinated children gathered at New York's Capitol for the vote to protest.

Supporters of the bill say religious beliefs about vaccines shouldn't eclipse scientific evidence that they work, noting the US Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states have the right to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. During the Assembly's floor debate, supporters brought up scourges of the past that were defeated in the US through vaccines.

"I'm old enough to have been around when polio was a real threat," said Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, a Democrat representing the city of Manhattan. "I believe in science .... Your personal opinions, which may be based on junk science, do not trump the greater good."

Supporters also suggest some parents may be claiming the religious exemption for their children even though their opposition is actually based on scientifically discredited claims about the dangers of vaccines.

The bill would not change an existing state exemption given to children who cannot have vaccines for medical reasons, such as a weakened immune system.

Cuomo told reporters on Wednesday that he believes public health – and the need to protect those who cannot get vaccinated because for medical reasons – outweighs the concerns about religious freedom.

"I understand freedom of religion," he said. "I have heard the anti-vaxxers' theory, but I believe both are overwhelmed by the public health risk."

The current measles outbreak has renewed concern about the exemptions in many states. The nation last saw as many cases in 1992, when more than 2,200 were reported.

Once common in the US, measles became rare after vaccination campaigns that started in the 1960s. A decade ago, there were fewer than 100 cases a year.

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But the Health Ministry did nearly nothing to reduce the "resistance pockets" that put not only their own unvaccinated children, but the public as a whole, at risk, because vaccinations protect not only those who receive them directly, but also provide herd immunity for the general population when the rate of vaccination is high enough.

But that's not all. This past year, the Health Ministry received a number of complaints about specific doctors who advise parents not to vaccinate their children – some of whom even gave parents the false information that vaccinations are dangerous. And what did the Health Ministry do? Again, nearly nothing. The ministry remembered to take action only after an exposé in the Israel Hayom weekend magazine interviewed senior health care officials, who warned about the ministry's helplessness.

There's more: In November 2018, the Knesset State Control Committee held a special discussion on the Health Ministry's failures to combat the anti-vaccination phenomenon, and senior Health Ministry officials said a specially-appointed committee would be done "clarifying" the actions of doctors who discourage vaccination within a period of three weeks. Since then, more than five months have passed. The "clarification" just wrapped up this week, and it did not include all the doctors allegedly involved.

The committee appointed to look into doctors who discourage vaccinations made the unprecedented determination that the reduced rate of vaccination in Israel, which has helped spur the measles outbreak, was caused in party by "dangerous calls by members of health professions not to vaccinate in accordance with the vaccination program, in violation of the [country's] vaccination policy." Yet even these hard findings are not prompting the Health Ministry to launch a nation-wide campaign to encourage vaccination and an explanatory campaign aimed at both doctors and the public.

The findings of the Health Ministry committee are groundbreaking, and the committee has done impressive work. But the Health Ministry is still doing too little, too late in fighting the dangerous anti-vaxxer phenomenon and, as usual, is not launching any national program to deal with the problem or with the measles outbreak itself. The Health Ministry continues to put out small fires without addressing the big picture, which is going up in the flames of ignorance and manipulation by doctors; the ministry's own insufficient preparedness for a measles outbreak; and the ongoing harm to public health care.

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In a six-page decision rendered hours after a hearing on the matter, Judge Lawrence Knipel denied the parents' petition seeking to lift the vaccination order, imposed last week to stem the worst measles outbreak to hit the city since 1991.

The judge sided with municipal health officials who defended the order as a rare but necessary step to contain a surge in the highly contagious disease that has infected at least 329 people so far, most of them children from Orthodox Jewish communities in the borough of Brooklyn.

Another 222 cases have been diagnosed elsewhere in New York State, mostly in a predominantly ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Rockland County, northwest of Manhattan.

The New York outbreaks are part of a larger resurgence of measles across the country, with at least 555 cases confirmed in 20 states, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Health experts say the virus, which can cause severe complications and even death, has spread mostly among school-age children whose parents declined to get them vaccinated. Most profess philosophical or religious reasons or cite concerns – debunked by medical science – that the three-way measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine may cause autism.

The judge rejected the parents' contention that the vaccination order was excessive or coercive, noting that it does not call for forcibly administering the vaccine to those who refuse it.

Under the public health emergency declared last Tuesday by Mayor Bill de Blasio, residents of certain affected Brooklyn neighborhoods who refuse orders to obtain an MMR vaccine face fines unless they can otherwise demonstrate immunity to measles or provide a valid medical exemption.

The court challenge was filed in Brooklyn's Supreme Court on behalf of five mothers and their children in the affected neighborhoods. Their identities were kept confidential to protect the children's privacy, their lawyers said.

They told Knipel in court on Thursday the city had overstepped its authority and that quarantining the infected would be a preferable approach.

Robert Krakow, an attorney for the parents, estimated that just 0.0006% of the population of Brooklyn and Queens had measles. "That's not an epidemic," he said. "It's not Ebola. It's not smallpox."

The health department's lawyers argued that quarantining was ineffective because people carrying the virus can be contagious before symptoms appear.

The judge cited 39 cases diagnosed in Michigan that have been traced to an individual traveling from the Williamsburg community at the epicenter of Brooklyn's outbreak. The surge in measles there originated with an unvaccinated child who became infected on a visit to Israel, where the highly contagious virus is also running rampant.

Krakow later told Reuters he was reviewing the judge's dismissal of the case – brought under special proceedings for the appeal of administrative actions – to determine how his clients might respond.

The number of measles cases worldwide nearly quadrupled in the first quarter of 2019 to 112,163 compared with the same period last year, the World Health Organization said this week.

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