Suspected measles outbreak kills nearly 100 children in Bangladesh

Health ministry data show children aged six months to five years with suspected measles symptoms soared to 6,476.Bangladesh says it suspects measles has killed at least 98 children in the past three weeks, official data show, with the capital, Dhaka, ramping up vaccination efforts in the worst affected areas.Last week, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman directed two senior ministers to travel across the South Asian nation of 170 million people to assess the scale of the crisis to help coordinate a response.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4How the US and Israel are waging war on Iran’s medicines, vaccineslist 2 of 4UN agency warns of ‘sharp increase’ in measles cases in the Americaslist 3 of 4Sudan’s Darfur grapples with severe measles outbreak amid ongoing violencelist 4 of 4Global health’s defining testend of listData from the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare released on Sunday showed that the number of children aged six months to five years old with suspected measles symptoms soared to 6,476.“Compared with past years, the number of affected children is higher, and the death toll is higher too,” Halimur Rashid, director at Communicable Disease Control, told the AFP news agency.The largest number of suspected cases on record was in 2005 at 25,934, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data. That number had significantly declined in succeeding years until this year.Rashid attributed the potential outbreak to “multifactorial causes, including a shortage of vaccines”.The confirmed number of measles cases among children aged six months to five years stands at 826 with 16 deaths. Experts said in many cases, testing is either not done or patients die before testing can be carried out.Measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases, according to the WHO, and is transmitted when a person coughs or sneezes. While the disease can affect a person of any age, it is most common among children and can cause complications, including brain swelling and severe breathing problems.