C T Online Desk: As of Jul 21, Bangladesh has registered 28,443 hospitalised dengue patients since Jan this year, and the death toll was 156.
Bangladesh Health Minister Zahid Maleque has called on employers, factory owners and office space administrators to be more mindful of the dangers of the dengue virus and keep their respective premises clean amid a prevalence of the disease mostly among active workers.
“Majority of the hospitalised patients are between 18 and 60 years old, and some of them said they suspect they were infected by dengue while at work,” he said on Saturday, referring to recent data on dengue hospitalisations.
The dengue virus can only be transmitted from the bites of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the known carrier.
The minister urged employers, factory owners and office space administrators to use environmentally friendly insecticides and to clear out any standing water pools, which act as breeding sites for Aedes mosquitoes.
A pre-monsoon government-funded survey of Dhaka city has uncovered an alarming surge in Aedes mosquitoes, fuelling the worst spread of the disease in five years.
The survey found that 55 wards in the Dhaka city corporations were at high risk of dengue infections.
The preliminary findings from another ongoing survey in the port city of Chattogram showed a significant rise in the number of households inadvertently harbouring larvae of Aedes mosquitoes.
During his visit to a local hospital, the minister said he received complaints from parents who strongly suspected that their children contracted the virus at school. As a result, he urged school administrators to prioritise campus cleanliness and employ eco-friendly mosquito prevention measures.
“Many parents told me that their children can not be infected by the virus as they keep their household clean and put measures to keep mosquitoes away. They suspect their kids were infected at their respective schools.”
As of Friday morning, Bangladesh has registered 28,443 hospitalised dengue patients since Jan this year.
The death toll from the mosquito-borne disease was 156.
The dengue outbreak has been worse in 2023 than in previous years.
In June, as many as 5,956 people were hospitalised with the disease, and 34 died. There were 566 cases in January, 166 in February, 111 in March, 143 in April and 1,036 in May.
Six people died in January, three in February, two in April and two in May.
Most of the deaths by dengue occurred due to haemorrhagic fever and shock syndrome, which health experts associated with some new variants of the deadly virus, previously undetected in Bangladesh.
Last year, hospitals up and down the country reported 62,382 patients taking medical care, and the death toll stood at 281, the highest since the record-keeping began for dengue hospitalisations in the 1960s.
Bangladesh witnessed over 100,000 dengue hospitalisation in 2019, which stands as the record number of cases in a single year. The official death toll that year was recorded as 179.
