With all the attention on hantavirus and ebola outbreaks, the devastating measles outbreak in Bangladesh has gone all but unnoticed. What measles outbreak, you ask? Well, precisely.
In just two short months, since mid-March, Bangladesh has seen 60,000 suspected measles cases and 528 suspected measles-related deaths, the vast majority of them children under 5 years old. Yikes!
The irony is that, under disgraced ex-Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed, Bangladesh was making good progress in completely eliminating measles with a robust community-led vaccination campaign. After the July Uprising of 2024, though, the interim government dropped the ball, the vaccination supply was disrupted, and immunization campaigns postponed. The whole thing was made worse by hospital staffing shortages caused by, among other things, foreign aid cuts, principally by the Trump administration in the USA.
And here we see the consequences. UNICEF and the WHO watched it happening and issued stern warnings, but nothing changed. This is now the largest measles outbreak in Bangladesh in decades and hospitals are already overwhelmed, with no end in sight.
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