Children's risk of rotavirus diarrhoea and dehydration rises in winter, yet the vaccine is not part of Bangladesh's national immunisation programme. In a column in Ajker Patrika, Faria Ejaz begins with a middle-class mother's experience: taking her son for the RotaTeq vaccine at a private hospital in 2023, she found each dose cost Tk 2,993 plus a service charge, with two or three doses needed. The views are the writer's own.
She cites an icddr,b report of 14 August 2025: an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 children under five die of rotavirus in Bangladesh each year and more than 100,000 are infected. More than three-quarters of families spend over 10 percent of their monthly income on treatment; each infection costs about $161 on average, and hospital admissions cost about $10 million a year.
In IEDCR's hospital-based surveillance, which began in July 2012 and now covers seven hospitals, 18,988 of 75,985 diarrhoea patients were tested between 2012 and 2025 and 11,422 (60 percent) had rotavirus; in one year 632 of 978 samples (64.62 percent) were positive, and infections rise in winter. The virus survives longer at 4 to 20 degrees Celsius, so the long winters of northern Bangladesh bring higher risk. The vaccines in use cut hospital admissions by 81 to 100 percent.
According to the writer, 132 countries include the vaccine in national programmes, and in South Asia only Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had not. Bangladesh received Gavi approval in 2016, updated its plan in 2020 and renewed its commitment in 2022, but has not introduced it. At an icddr,b discussion on 14 August, UNICEF doctor Md Riad Mahmud said introduction would cost about $34 million; four WHO-prequalified vaccines, Rotarix, RotaTeq, Rotavac and Rotasiil, have been tested in Bangladesh, and budget and cost-benefit analysis are the main causes of delay.
A N M Tanvir Chowdhury, assistant professor of paediatrics at Rangpur Medical College, told the writer the main challenges would be timely supply, completing doses within the set ages, keeping the 2 to 8 degree Celsius cold chain and reaching remote areas. Children who fall ill repeatedly in their first 1,000 days suffer malnutrition, the writer argues; the evidence, the vaccines and the list of challenges are all there, and what is needed now is a national decision to fund it.
Source: Ajker Patrika
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