In the first 11 months of 2022, health officials in Ghor province have recorded 29 deaths of children due to measles, with another 545 infected.
“This is just the number of cases that we have recorded at the hospital,” Mohammad Naeem Mesbah, head of the measles unit at Ghor Provincial Hospital, tells Zan Times.
According to Mesbah, those reported numbers are down from the same 11-month period in 2021 when 1380 children were infected with measles and 21 died.
“Although the infection rate has dropped during the same period compared to last year, the fatality rate has increased,” adds Mesbah.
He believes that the main reasons for the increase in the measles fatality rate are a lack of measles vaccine, an overburdened healthcare system that makes it difficult for people to obtain care, and a lack of public awareness of the symptoms and dangers of this disease.
“Measles is a highly contagious and dangerous disease,” says Mohammad Musa Ulfat, a pediatrician at Ghor Provincial Hospital. He lists the initial symptoms of measles in children: high fever, runny nose, and cough. As well, tiny white spots can appear on the inside of the mouth, the World Health Organization explains. A few days later, a rash will start, spreading downward from the face and neck.
Measles is such a highly contagious viral disease that the hospital statistics in Ghor are likely a significant undercount of the actual number of infections and deaths in the province. Although there has been a highly effective vaccine available for measles since the 1960s, the World Health Organization reports that the disease still kills around 150,000 people annually. Most of those deaths are of children in the developing world or in areas of conflict where vaccination programs are difficult to undertake.
Health officials in Ghor say that more than 140,000 children are expected to be vaccinated this year.
