2,242 dengue cases logged in a day, a new record

Bangladesh has registered a record 2,242 new hospitalisations due to dengue in a day, taking the tally this year to 30,685.

The death toll from the mosquito-borne disease rose by 11 to 167 in a 24-hour count on Saturday.

Of the patients newly hospitalised with the disease, 1,239 cases were in Dhaka, while 1,003 were outside the capital, reports bdnews24.com.

Nine deaths were recorded in Dhaka, while another two were outside the city.

Currently, 6,656 patients are hospitalised with dengue. Of them, 3,839 are in Dhaka and 2,817 are outside the capital.

The dengue outbreak has been worse in 2023 than in previous years.

In June, 5,956 people were hospitalised with the disease and 34 people 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.

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.

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.

The survey found that 55 wards in the Dhaka city corporations were at high risk of dengue infections.

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.