The number of measles cases since April has kept on increasing up to date.


Somalia and Somaliland right now are facing the largest outbreak in the world.


We have seen the number of cases just keep on increasing from 2 or 3 patients per day. I remember last week the nurse told me they receive 18 patients.




The MSF team has seen close to 7,000 cases in both Somalia and Somaliland since the beginning of the year and the number is still rising.


These areas are affected by conflict. Right now, if you know what is going on in the horn of Africa with the drought and associated mass population displacement, there are fragile and weak healthcare systems. So all these components with measles is making the whole situation worse.


There is low vaccination coverage in Somalia and Somaliland. For instance, the data that we have put for example - I was talking to a colleague - and he told me vaccination coverage for children under 2 years is as low as less than 15 %.


Measles itself is caused by a virus and with measles basically weakening the immune system, it makes people prone to get other infections.


So right now what we are doing as MSF, first and foremost with the sick children, we are doing case management, which entails hospitalization of our patients and also together with the ministries of health in both South Sudan and Somaliland we are planning on conducting vaccination campaigns in the most affected areas


It's going to be a toll because the populations are dispersed so there’s a lot logistics implications involved. Teams really have to go from house to house and some of these houses are far from each other and then most of these populations have moved, so they are not in one place. But we are doing the best we can to get the ministry of health to plan their microplanning to the best we can so that we ensure that we get over 90 per cent coverage to be able to control the outbreak.

We are dealing with measles for the moment but what we have seen over the last two years, especially in regions like where we are in Somalia and Somaliland and the north of South Sudan, it’s the impact that COVID has had on routine vaccination activities; it’s not only measles vaccination that is affected, there are also other vaccine preventable diseases that were affected. So we are asking ourselves the question, we’re seeing measles now, are we going to see a resurgence of another vaccine preventable disease coming up?


The campaign aims at vaccinating 123,000 children aged from 6 months to 5 years old in Somaliland, and 120,000 aged up to 15 years old in South Sudan.