Dengue death toll since January nears 400

Staff Reporter :
Eleven dengue patients died in the country in 24 hours till Sunday morning, raising the fatalities from the mosquito-borne disease in Bangladesh to 398 this year.

According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) some 2,905 more patients were hospitalised with the viral fever during the period.

Of the new patients, 1,042 were admitted to hospitals in Dhaka and the rest outside it.

A total of 9,733 dengue patients, including 4,335 in the capital, are now receiving treatment at hospitals across the country.

So far, the DGHS has recorded 85,411 dengue cases and 75,280 recoveries this year.
Last year, a total of 281 patients died due to the mosquito-borne disease.

bdnews24 add: The death toll from dengue fever in Bangladesh since January is fast approaching the 400 mark, with the number of cases rising rapidly in the deadliest outbreak of the disease in the country’s history.

The death toll from the mosquito-borne disease increased by 11 to 398 in the 24 hours to Sunday morning.

As many as 1,863 new cases were detected outside Dhaka, but seven of the deaths occurred in the capital.

On Sunday morning, 9,733 dengue patients were in hospital care around the country, and 5,398 of them were outside Dhaka.

The dengue outbreak has been worse in 2023 than in previous years. Last year, hospitals reported 62,382 patients taking medical care, and the death toll stood at 281, the previous highest since record-keeping began for dengue hospitalisations in the 1960s.

In 2019, Bangladesh witnessed over 100,000 dengue hospitalisations, a record number of cases in a single year.

The official death toll that year was recorded at 179. A pre-monsoon government-funded survey of Dhaka city has uncovered an alarming surge of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, known carriers of the dengue virus, fuelling the worst spread of the disease over the past five years.

Most of the deaths caused 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.