Bangladesh is struggling to tackle a measles outbreak that has killed almost 1,000 children this year despite a renewed vaccination campaign DHAKA, Bangladesh -- Eight-month-old Rojatun Jannat Ramisa is struggling to breathe in a hospital in Bangladesh’s capital as her parents sit helplessly beside her. She's one of thousands of children sickened by a measles outbreak that's sweeping across the country and has killed hundreds of children following setbacks to the country's vaccine program. Ramisa’s mother Ranu Akhter traveled hundreds of kilometers (miles) after doctors in eastern Bangladesh referred her to a specialized child hospital in Dhaka to seek treatment for the life-threatening condition.
I saw that those children also had red rashes on their bodies, sores in their mouths and fevers,” Akhter told The at Dhaka Shishu Hospital. Bangladesh has been racing to halt the outbreak's spread since March, when more than 100 children died in less than a month. By Tuesday, the death toll from suspected measles cases reached 999 since the start of the year, according to the government’s Directorate General of Health Services.
Since March, the country has recorded more than 166,000 suspected measles cases, including 19,835 laboratory-confirmed infections, according to the Ministry of Health. The government launched an emergency vaccination drive in March together with the World Health Organization, the U.N. children’s agency and the Gavi vaccine alliance. It began with a focus on children from 6 months to 5 years old and later expanded nationwide in phases.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne disease that causes fever, respiratory symptoms and a characteristic rash. It can sometimes have severe or fatal complications, especially in young children, according to the WHO. Two doses of a vaccine provide strong protection against measles, but the WHO says 95% of the population has to be vaccinated in order to stop the disease from spreading — which protects children like Ramisa who are too young to be vaccinated as well as immunocompromised people.
A few years ago, Bangladesh had measles largely under control, with a vaccination program that was credited for decades for protecting children and mothers from the deadly diseases of tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, poliomyelitis and measles. Between 2021 and 2025, the country recorded just 100 to 300 cases per year, down from 2,410 cases in 2020. But in the last few years, disruptions to the vaccine program have left a growing number of children unvaccinated.
First the pandemic interrupted routine vaccinations, and then in 2024 the government largely missed a vaccination campaign previously carried out every four years. Atiqul Islam, a neonatal and child specialist at Bangladesh Shishu Hospital and Institute, said during the pandemic period in 2021 and 2022, many did not take their children to get vaccinated. During the previous interim government, vaccines were also unavailable at many vaccination centers,” he said.
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