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 programme.
Ramisa’s mother Ranu Akhter travelled hundreds of kilometres after doctors in eastern Bangladesh referred her to a specialised child hospital in Dhaka to seek treatment for the life-threatening condition. “Fourteen days ago, when we were at the district hospital, there were other children being treated alongside my daughter. I saw that those children also had red rashes on their bodies, sores in their mouths and fevers,” Ms. Every day, the death toll is rising.
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 (September 8, 2026), 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 1,66,000 suspected measles cases, including 19,835 laboratory-confirmed infections, according to the Ministry of Health. 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.
Akhter told The Associated Press at Dhaka Shishu Hospital. “It made me realise how widespread the measles outbreak is,” she said. The doctor said his colleagues are struggling to treat infected children who often arrive at the hospital with serious complications such as pneumonia, diarrhea and encephalitis, or brain swelling.
