Prime Minister Tarique Rahman orders Ishraque Hossain to resign from cabinet

A joint independent evaluation team has recommended that Bangladesh vaccinate unvaccinated children aged six months to nine years on a priority basis within two weeks to contain a measles outbreak that has now killed more than 1,190 people, Prothom Alo reported.

The 70-member team of national and international experts, including representatives of the World Health Organization, UNICEF and Gavi, presented its findings at a workshop at a Dhaka hotel last Wednesday as part of a review of the Expanded Programme on Immunization and vaccine-preventable disease surveillance.

It recommended identifying unvaccinated children aged six months to nine years and giving them priority jabs, and selecting districts with high infection rates and large numbers of unvaccinated children for priority vaccination. Both tasks should be completed within two weeks, it said.

The team attributed the explosive outbreak to immunization failures: large numbers of children missed vaccination between 2000 and 2025, measles-rubella vaccine stocks ran out in 2025, and children older than two were excluded from routine vaccination. Bangladesh's population density and an inadequate response to the outbreak also contributed, it said.

The outbreak began in March this year and shows no sign of ending. Bangladesh launched a national measles-rubella campaign on 5 April that ended on 20 May. The health ministry has continued vaccinating children missed by the campaign alongside routine immunization, but infections have not been brought under control.

For younger children, the team recommended giving the measles-rubella vaccine at six months of age while the outbreak continues, and isolating children of about that age after vaccination. It also recommended vaccinating health workers.

In its longer-term recommendations, the team called for raising the maximum age for routine vaccination from two years to five, updating local immunization plans to reach persistently missed children, and checking vaccination cards at school admission to catch children who were missed. It said planning for the next national measles-rubella campaign, likely in 2029 or 2030, should start on time.

Public health expert Mustaq Hossain, a former chief scientific officer at the government's Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research, told Prothom Alo that nearly all the recommendations were important and that experts had long pressed for raising the vaccination age. He said the recommendations gave little weight to engaging communities, and that poor families would not come to hospitals without financial and medicine support, making infection control difficult.

The Directorate General of Health Services said in a bulletin that the combined toll of suspected and laboratory-confirmed measles deaths had reached 1,196, with seven more children dying in the 24 hours to 8am on Sunday, The Business Standard reported. A total of 1,258 new suspected cases were reported in that period, taking the cumulative number of suspected cases to 213,244, while confirmed infections rose to 23,122. Since 15 March, 189,484 patients with suspected measles have been hospitalised and 181,756 have recovered.

Anthropic said on Sunday it will commit 5% of its shares to a new "public benefit fund" that will make donations for the public good, saying the move would give it "increased flexibility and scale" to support projects for societal benefit.

The fund will be structured as a wholly owned entity inside the company, according to the technology news site TechCrunch. It may also receive an additional 2% of Anthropic's shares for every 50% increase in the company's value, the firm said.

The developer of the Claude chatbot said the money could be used for large donations to established non-profit organisations or for direct payments to specific populations. It said no shares held by the fund would be used for lobbying or political donations in the United States or overseas.

Anthropic said it will publish more details on the fund's structure and governance in the coming months. It has already committed $200 million to study the effect of artificial intelligence on the jobs market, and said that "given the pace of AI progress, bolder approaches may be needed".

The announcement comes as Anthropic lays the ground for a possible blockbuster stock-market listing. The BBC reported the listing could value the firm at more than $1 trillion (about 750 billion pounds). Anthropic told prospective investors that its revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion in the three months to the end of September.

The company is presenting the fund as a response to concern about AI's impact on society and the economy. It reportedly said in its initial public offering filing that AI could pose "catastrophic or existential risks to humanity". Public sentiment toward the AI industry has grown more negative, with Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei describing it as "fundamentally a crisis of trust".

Technology billionaire Elon Musk responded to the announcement on social media by saying he recommended giving the shares directly to the public, adding that this is what he would do.

Research published by the International Monetary Fund in 2024 suggested that almost 40% of jobs worldwide will be affected by AI, a figure that rises to as high as 60% in advanced economies.