World Health Organization spokeswoman Margaret Harris urged immediate action to both test for and control an outbreak of measles that is now “raging” in Afghanistan, and to get food in for the children. “For malnourished children, measles is a death sentence,” she told journalists in a Nov. 12 briefing from Kabul by Zoom, Tolo News reported. “Sadly, we’ve had 87 deaths [from measles] reported. We will see so many more if we don’t move on this quickly.”
Reminding people that over three million children under the age of five in the country are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition by the end of this year, she stressed the need to urgently scale up surveillance and testing for measles in the country. She noted that even without sufficient monitoring, it was clear that “a measles outbreak is raging.”
