Bangladesh is battling to contain the world’s worst measles outbreak, a crisis exacerbated by weak data, inadequate outreach and vaccination gaps that experts say offers a warning to other nations about the deadly risk of falling immunisation rates.
Bangladesh, whose routine vaccination programme faltered in 2025, reported 202,000 suspected measles cases – 22,000 of them laboratory-confirmed – since the start of the outbreak in mid-March to October 9, the World Health Organisation said. That’s more suspected cases than any other country this year.
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.
Bangladesh’s experience shows the challenge of containing an outbreak when vaccination coverage falls below 95pc, a level the WHO says is needed to prevent outbreaks. Bangladesh almost achieved that in recent years but in 2025 coverage dropped.
A Reuters review of WHO documents, alongside interviews with more than a dozen scientists, health workers and officials, shows Bangladesh was also hampered in its emergency response by data that left out millions of children, shortcomings in preparation and a failure to reach enough parents.
“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, he said.
“The response will stop the outbreak eventually, but in the meantime, many will have had measles, and some will have died,” he said.
Ziauddin Hyder, special assistant on health affairs to Prime Minister Tarique Rahman, told Reuters in September the government was doing everything it could to end the outbreak. The government did not respond to further questions sent in October for this article.
‘They came only after i Buried my son’
In the northeast 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’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. “They came only after I buried my son,” he 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.
In the town of Chhatak, also in the Sylhet region, 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.
“No health worker came to tell us,” her father said.
In a report published in July this year, WHO and UNICEF estimated first-dose coverage in 2025 had fallen to 90pc, while second-dose coverage was 86pc, several percentage points below the 95pc needed for herd immunity.
The report also raised questions about the quality of official data on vaccinations for measles and other diseases for the years 2023 to 2025.
It said preliminary figures sometimes showed numbers of those inoculated exceeded 100pc of those targeted, indicating mistakes in counting doses or target numbers.