Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams in Afghanistan have reported a surge in measles patients at three MSF-supported hospitals since January. While measles is endemic in Afghanistan, such a high number of cases and an increase in deaths so early in the year has alarmed medical staff.
Rapid vaccination urgently needed
Community-level rapid and targeted vaccination in the districts most affected by ongoing outbreaks would help reduce the number of measles cases, and in turn free up hospital beds for children with less preventable conditions.
At least one child has died from measles every day in 2025, according to data MSF staff collected at the Mazar-i-Sharif Regional Hospital in Balkh province, Herat Regional Hospital in Herat province, and Boost Provincial Hospital in Helmand province. This is nearly three times as many deaths as reported during the same period in 2024.
“These are preventable deaths,” says Mickael Le Paih, country representative for MSF in Afghanistan. "Measles can be a deadly disease, particularly for children with underlying health conditions like malnutrition or congenital heart defects. It can also be prevented by a vaccine, but the immunization coverage remains low in Afghanistan.”
An increase in severe measles cases
At the three hospitals across Afghanistan where our teams are supporting measles detection and treatment, we saw 4,799 children suspected of having measles in the first eight weeks of 2025. This includes both complicated measles cases (25 percent) that require admission to a hospital, and less severe cases (75 percent) requiring outpatient treatment.
At Herat Regional Hospital, MSF has launched an emergency response to the high number of complicated measles cases that we are treating—expanding our measles isolation ward from 11 beds to 60 beds, hiring additional staff, and tapping into emergency medications. There were 664 patients admitted in the first eight weeks of 2025, a 180 percent increase from 2024.
At Boost Provincial Hospital in Helmand, our team has seen 1,866 suspected measles cases in the first eight weeks of the year—a 369 percent increase in the number of cases compared with the same period in 2024.
At Mazar-i-Sharif Regional Hospital, MSF has treated 1,499 suspected measles patients alongside the Ministry of Public Health, nearly a 36 percent increase in the number of cases compared with 2024.
Hospitals stretched to capacity
“We are dedicating additional resources, but we are already running out of space for patients suffering not just from measles, but seasonal illnesses as well,” says Le Paih.
The measles outbreak is taking its toll on children and parents. It requires collective decisive efforts to implement targeted vaccinations and enable wide access to measles treatment kits.
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Our work in Afghanistan
MSF runs seven projects in Bamyan, Helmand, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar, Khost and Kunduz, with a particular focus on delivering secondary health care services. In 2024, MSF teams in Afghanistan provided more than 404,500 emergency room consultations, 245,557 outpatient consultations, admitted 119,349 patients, assisted 45,061 deliveries, and undertook 18,149 surgical interventions. More than 13,030 measles patients were treated, 9,751 children were admitted to inpatient therapeutic feeding centers, and 4,016 children were enrolled in outpatient therapeutic feeding centers.
