Official dengue death toll in Bangladesh makes record

The official death toll from the last year’s dengue outbreak hit a new height as the government on Thursday revealed that 179 people died of the mosquito-borne viral fever in 2019.

The Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research has at last finished reviewing all of 276 dengue death reports prepared by registered doctors and confirmed that dengue took 179 lives.

On Thursday, the Health Emergency Operation Centre and Control Room said the institute, however, had not explained how the rest, 97 people, died.

‘We can only tell that 179 people died of dengue,’ the health emergency control room in-charge Ayesha Akther told New Age.

Dengue emerged as a disease in Bangladesh in 2000, and caused 93 deaths that year due to, it is said, doctors’ inexperience of the disease.

In 2001, dengue deaths dropped to 44. Though the number rose to 58 in 2002, never did it exceed 26 until 2018.

In 2019, the disease broke out to epidemic proportions and set a new record of 1,01,354 hospitalisations, according to the Directorate General of Health Services.

In 2019, dengue also spread outside the capital for the first time in the fourth week of July.

Within a week, dengue infection spread across the country and its severity in the outlying districts overtook that of the capital.

In August alone, 52,636 people were hospitalised for dengue, which is the highest for a month in the country’s history. Even the yearly total hospitalisation for dengue was never so high until 2019.

The monthly hospitalisations for dengue came down to 16,854 dengue in September and 8,143 in October, 4,011 in November and 1,147 in December. Even these numbers are the highest for the respective months of a year.

People continue to be diagnosed with dengue in January and February this year as well.

On Thursday, the health services directorate said that at least 241 patients had been hospitalised with dengue across the country so far this year. (Source: New Age)