About 100 million Chinese children aged 8 months to 14 years will be inoculated with the measles vaccine between September 11 and 20, the Jinghua Times reports.

No imported measles vaccines will be used this time, and all vaccines will be produced by companies in Shanghai, Wuhan, Lanzhou and Beijing, said Zhao Kai, chairman of the Health Ministry's expert advisory committee on immunization planning.

This inoculation campaign will be the largest in scale to be done in such a short time. It will include children aged 8 months to 14 years old in Beijing, Shanghai, Henan, Heilongjiang and Guangxi; children from 8 months to 6 years old in Jilin, Hainan and Shandong Provinces; and children between 8 months and 4 years old in 24 other provinces, municipalities and areas, according to national center for diseases control.

The plan to target kids by geography is based on information from previous patients regarding age and situation after disease outbreaks. Each targeted child should get the vaccine regardless of whether he or she has previously been inoculated with the measles vaccine or contracted the disease, according to the diseases control department of the Ministry of Health.

Measles is an acute, contagious viral disease that usually occurs in childhood and is characterized by fever, red spots on the skin and catarrhal symptoms. The disease was extremely widespread before the vaccine was introduced.

In 2008, 282,000 measles cases were reported, 131,000 of which were in China. Last year in China, 39 people died from measles, according to statistics released by China's Ministry of Health.