Nine more dengue patients die, 2,288 hospitalied

Hospitals in Bangladesh have admitted 2,288 new dengue patients in a day, taking the tally this year to 94,312.

In the 24 hours to Thursday morning, nine more deaths were reported from the mosquito-borne disease, the Directorate General of Health Services said.

With the new fatalities, the death toll from the disease since January increased to 444. As many as 1,389 new cases were detected outside Dhaka, but seven of the deaths occurred in the capital.

On Thursday morning, 8,661 dengue patients were in hospital care around the country, and 4,857 of them were outside Dhaka, reports bdnews24.com.

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.