Dhaka, April 5 Bangladesh on Sunday said a severe outbreak of measles has claimed the lives of at least 94 children in the past 19 days, prompting the government to launch an emergency campaign to combat the infectious disease.
As the outbreak affected 56 out of the 64 administrative districts, the government of Prime Minister Tarique Rahman blamed the interim government of Muhammad Yunus for its failure to provide vaccines in a timely manner.
The Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said that 10 of the total 94 deaths related to measles occurred in 24 hours ending at 8 am on Sunday, even as the number of suspected measles cases detected grew to 5,792 during the 19 days, with 974 of them occurring since Saturday.
"This highly infectious disease has seen a sharp increase this year, particularly since March," a DGHS statement said, attributing the phenomenon to a gap in vaccination last year.
Officials reported that the disease was spreading rapidly and by now had affected 56 out of 64 administrative districts. The DGHS report suggests that the outbreak has been most severe in the northwestern Rajshahi region, where health officials have stepped up surveillance and case-tracking.
Health Minister Sardar Shakhawat Hossain Bakul said that the emergency vaccination drive would cover the "most affected areas" before being expanded throughout Bangladesh.
In a related development, Rahman's government accused Yunus' interim government of being negligent towards the issue. "You can call it the failure or negligence of the previous interim government in carrying out the campaign to prevent measles or rubella," Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed said.
Mohammad Rafiqul Islam, the secretary of health affairs in the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), echoed this sentiment, adding that the measles outbreak occurred "due to the interim government's failure to provide vaccines in a timely manner."
Islam said that the first case of measles was detected in Rohingya camps on January 4, when the interim government was still in power. He claimed that the government was aware of the situation at that time but effective measures could not be taken in time, leading to the current rise in infections.
According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, Bangladesh's measles vaccination coverage was over 96 per cent from 2016 to 2024, the year when a violent student-led protest toppled the then prime minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami League government.
Health officials said that Bangladesh's vaccination rates experienced a significant decline in 2024 and 2025, when the interim government was running the country, while previously most Bangladeshi children received the vaccine on time.
"We were committed to reduce the (measles death) number to zero by December 2025, but we failed to achieve the target due to poor vaccination programmes," chief of the National Verification Committee of Measles and Rubella, Mahbubur Rahman, said.
As the outbreak continued to spread quickly, independent health experts said that the actual toll could be higher, as measles testing is either not done or patients die before testing.