Vaccination Gaps Leave Bangladesh’s Children Exposed

Bangladesh reported 202,000 suspected measles cases and 1,147 deaths in the world’s worst outbreak, the World Health Organisation said. Children under five accounted for 94 per cent of reported deaths. Officials recorded cases from mid-March through October 9, including 22,000 confirmed by laboratory tests. Weakened vaccination coverage and failures to reach families have complicated efforts to contain the outbreak.

The coverage gap

The WHO says vaccination coverage must reach 95 per cent to prevent measles outbreaks. Bangladesh had nearly reached that level in recent years, but its routine vaccination programme faltered in 2025. A WHO and UNICEF report published in July estimated first-dose coverage that year at 90 per cent and second-dose coverage at 86 per cent, several percentage points below the level needed for herd immunity.

The report also questioned the quality of official vaccination data for measles and other diseases from 2023 to 2025. Preliminary figures sometimes counted more people vaccinated than the number targeted, suggesting errors in dose counts or target figures. A Reuters review of WHO documents and interviews with more than a dozen scientists, health workers and officials found that emergency preparations faced data gaps that excluded millions of children, preparation shortcomings and failures to reach enough parents.

The WHO said Bangladesh’s reported suspected cases exceeded those in any other country that year. Measles usually kills two or three people in every 1,000 cases, the organisation says. In poorer nations, though, factors including malnutrition can make the disease deadlier.

“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. He said vaccination made preventing an outbreak easier, cheaper and safer than responding to an emergency. “The response will stop the outbreak eventually, but in the meantime, many will have had measles, and some will have died.”

Families left unreached

In northeastern Sylhet, 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 he entered hospital. His family sold its three-wheeled auto rickshaw to pay for treatment. His unvaccinated four-year-old sister survived.

Arman’s father, Amin Mia, 26, said health workers didn’t reach their remote village in time to offer vaccinations. “They came only after I buried my son,” he said.

In Chhatak, also in Sylhet, nine-month-old Labiba Akter died unvaccinated in June. Her father, Humayun Rashid, a 30-year-old carpenter, said she could have received an inoculation in April, when an emergency programme lowered the vaccination age from nine months to six. “No health worker came to tell us,” he said.

Government response and hospital cases

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 didn’t respond to further questions sent in October.

Photographs documented children receiving care in the overcrowded measles isolation ward at Shahid Shamsuddin Ahmed Hospital in Sylhet on September 12, 2026. Masum, 8, received treatment after developing symptoms. Mohammad Nasir Ali, 40, appeared beside his seven-year-old son, Adil Ahmed, who had entered the ward for treatment that day; another caption identified Bilkis and other parents caring for children there.

A separate photograph described Urmi, 19, mourning as her 11-month-old son, Mohammad, deteriorated in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit in Narayanganj on May 11, 2026. The reported toll includes families who lacked timely access to vaccination and children being treated in crowded hospital wards.