Dengue Cases: Sharp rise rings alarm

“What thousands of bombs and a hundred of militants could not do, an Aedes mosquito has done it today. [I’m] hospitalised! Seeking blessing!” wrote Sanwar Hossain, chief of the bomb disposal unit of Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime Unit, in his Facebook page yesterday after being admitted with dengue fever.

With him, 49 new dengue patients were hospitalised yesterday, raising the tally of dengue patients to 6,694 this year. The number of patients exceeded the 6,000 mark only twice before in the last 18 years– 6,232 in 2002 and 6,060 in 2016.

Alarmingly, according to the data of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), this is a record outbreak of dengue fever since January, with three more months of the year to go.

The number of deaths so far is 17.

The DGHS data also said that only 2,769 out of the 6,060 patients took treatment at hospitals last year.

He added that they have also engaged students and teachers of different schools in the awareness campaign.

Emdadul said they would resume drive to clean water bodies, beginning from next week, to destroy mosquito breeding grounds.

Since the first-detected cases of dengue in Bangladesh in 2000, around 49,000 people have suffered from the fever, with at least 316 reported deaths. Most of the patients were from Dhaka or its neighbouring districts and they took treatment in hospitals and clinics in the capital, according to DGHS.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne tropical disease caused by the dengue virus. Typically, symptoms begin three to fourteen days after infection from mosquito bites. This may include high fever, headache, vomiting, muscle and joint pains, and skin rash.