Bangladesh Battles World's Worst Measles OutbreakHealth

So far, 1,147 people have died of the highly contagious disease, with 94 per cent of reported deaths among children under five years old, the WHO said.

“This is a real warning to every country,” said Mark Jit, a WHO vaccine adviser and professor at the School of Global Public Health at New York University. “Preventing an outbreak through vaccinations was easier, cheaper and safer than responding to an emergency.”

<h2>Coverage fell below the safety line</h2> Bangladesh&#8217;s experience shows how quickly an outbreak can take hold when vaccination coverage falls below 95 per cent, the level the WHO says is needed to prevent outbreaks. The country had almost achieved that level in recent years, but coverage dropped in 2025.

A joint WHO-UNICEF report published in July estimated that first-dose measles coverage in 2025 had fallen to 90 per cent, down from 96 per cent in 2024, while second-dose coverage dropped from 93 per cent to 86 per cent — several percentage points below the 95 per cent needed for herd immunity.

The report also questioned the quality of official vaccination data for 2023 to 2025, noting that preliminary figures sometimes showed inoculations exceeding 100 per cent of those targeted.

A Reuters review of WHO documents, along with interviews with more than a dozen scientists, health workers and officials, found that Bangladesh&#8217;s emergency response was hampered by data that left out millions of children, shortcomings in preparation and a failure to reach enough parents.

<h2>The human cost</h2> In the northeastern Sylhet region, one of the worst-hit areas in the nation of 178 million people, two-year-old Arman Hossain died unvaccinated in July, 24 hours after admission to hospital for treatment paid for by selling the family&#8217;s three-wheeled auto rickshaw. His unvaccinated four-year-old sister survived.

His father, Amin Mia, 26, said no health workers came to their remote village in Sylhet to offer vaccinations in time. &#8220;They came only after I buried my son,&#8221; he said.

In the town of Chhatak, also in Sylhet, the daughter of 30-year-old carpenter Humayun Rashid died unvaccinated in June, aged nine months. Labiba Akter could have received an inoculation in April, when an emergency programme lowered the vaccination age to six months from nine. &#8220;No health worker came to tell us,&#8221; her father said.

Measles usually kills two or three people in every 1,000 cases, the WHO says, but the disease can be more deadly in poorer nations because of factors such as malnutrition.

Ziauddin Hyder, special assistant on health affairs to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, told Reuters in September that the government was doing everything it could to end the outbreak. The government did not respond to further questions sent in October, Reuters reported.