Shafaqna English– Measles outbreak killed at least 98 children in the past three weeks, according to official data.
Health ministry data released on Sunday showed that children aged between six months and five years old with suspected measles symptoms soared to 6,476.
Last week, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman directed two senior ministers to travel across the South Asian nation of 170 million people in an effort to assess the scale of the crisis to help coordinate a response.“Compared with past years, the number of affected children is higher, and the death toll is higher too,” Halimur Rashid, director at the Communicable Disease Control, told AFP referring to the number in suspected cases.
The largest number of suspected cases on record was in 2005 at 25,934, according to World Health Organization (WHO) data, though that number had significantly declined until this year.
Rashid attributed the potential outbreak to “multifactorial causes, including a shortage of vaccines.”
The WHO estimates as many as 95,000 measles deaths globally every year, mostly among unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children under the age of five, according to its latest statistics.
Source: Arab News