Published : 29 Aug 2023, 07:07 PM
Updated : 29 Aug 2023, 07:07 PM
The government has logged 2,291 new cases of dengue fever in a day, taking the tally of infections since January to 119,133.
The death toll from the mosquito-borne disease increased by 13 to 569 in the 24 hours to Tuesday morning, the Directorate General of Health Services said.
Hospitals in Dhaka reported 920 new dengue cases and seven deaths while the numbers are 1,371 cases and six deaths outside the capital.
On Tuesday morning, as many as 8,218 patients with dengue fever were under hospital care, and 4,380 of them were outside Dhaka.
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 101,354 dengue hospitalisations, the previous 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.
