The escalating dengue cases in Bangladesh is emerging as a serious problem for Bangladesh’s healthcare system which has already been shattered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Every day new cases are reported from different parts of the county, mostly from capital Dhaka.
According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), 952 patients diagnosed with dengue are receiving treatment at hospitals in the country as of Friday.
Bangladesh has been seeing an uptrend in dengue cases since July and the situation worsened further in August.
Some 2,286 patients were hospitalized with dengue in July while 2,987 were found infected with the virus in the past 13 days.
A UNB photojournalist captured some photos at the Dengue Ward of Sir Salimullah Medical College and Hospital on Saturday.
Dengue fever was first reported in Bangladesh in 2000, claiming 93 lives that year. In the years that followed, the country learned to deal with the disease much better, but it did become endemic. Fatalities almost fell to zero at one stage, before spiking again in 2018, leading to the horrific crisis the following year.
The incidence of dengue has grown dramatically around the world in recent decades. A vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or mild and self-managed, and hence the actual numbers of dengue cases are under-reported, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The number of dengue cases reported to WHO increased over 8 folds over the last two decades, from 505,430 cases in 2000, to over 2.4 million in 2010, and 4.2 million in 2019. The reported deaths between the year 2000 and 2015 increased from 960 to 4032.
Source: United News of Bangladesh