The Medico-Legal Society of Victoria

Dr Linda Iles is a graduate of the University of Tasmania. She has worked as a consultant forensic pathologist at the University of Glasgow and at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, where she has been head of forensic pathology services for the past five years. She has an interest in forensic neuropathology, post mortem radiological imaging in forensic pathology practice and developing forensic pathology capacity in under resourced countries. In 2018 and 2019 she was engaged by the World Health Organisation to undertake medicolegal death investigations into the death of two infants following vaccination, and subsequently into a number of deaths in the measles emergency that followed.

On July 6 2018, two 1 year old infants died shortly after receiving the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine. Events over the following months amplified this tragedy. Dr Iles will describe the investigation into these deaths, and the events that culminated in an epidemic that saw the deaths of 83 people, predominantly children, in the Pacific nation