Three students at a San Diego school have been diagnosed with measles, creating San Diego County's first "cluster" outbreak of the disease in 17 years, public health officials said Monday.

Officials think the three children, who are related and not vaccinated, contracted the disease on a recent family trip to Europe, said county Public Health Officer Dr. Wilma Wooten.

Wooten said the outbreak should remind parents to get their children immunized - an effort that is not meeting national goals in the county, according to a 2007 San Diego County Report Card on Children and Families released Monday afternoon.

"This is a vaccine-preventable disease," Wooten said of the measles outbreak. "Since 2003, we've only had a total of four (isolated) cases. In 2007, 2004 and 2002 we didn't have any cases at all."

Wooten and San Diego Cooperative Charter School officials said Monday that they were notifying parents and other students of the outbreak, and that the three children were "absolutely fine" and recovering at home.

Measles, a highly contagious disease caused by a virus, has been nearly eradicated in the United States by vaccinations. Although people can die of the disease - which causes a red-dot rash, high fever, cough, runny nose, red, watery eyes and ear aches - they rarely do.

More often, victims die of measles complications. Those can include diarrhea, pneumonia, swelling of the brain and seizures.

The disease is increasingly rare in the United States, but it is common in Europe, Japan and other countries. It has been known to kill as many as one of every four people in developing countries, according to the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CDC spokesman Curtis Allen said the last big outbreaks in the United States were in 1991.

Allen said 120 children were killed and 11,000 more were hospitalized that year. He said public health officials increased their efforts to get children immunized after that, and that there were only 55 reported cases in the country in 2007.

Wooten said that three children died of the disease in San Diego County in 1990, when there were 985 reported cases.

But Wooten said a person who has had even a single vaccination is immune to the disease 95 percent of the time if exposed.

Children in the United States usually get two measles immunizations, once at 12 months old and again between the ages of 4 and 6.

The vaccinations are known as "MMRs," for measles, mumps and rubella, also known as the German measles.

The county's report card on children and families reported that about 83 percent of children in San Diego County received their basic childhood immunizations in 2006 - a figure that was higher than the state average but lower than federal public health officials' national objective of 90 percent.

- Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.