NEW DELHI: The death toll from dengue fever in India jumped to 84 on Wednesday, officials said, as hundreds of patients crowded emergency wards for treatment.
Twenty-two of the 28 new deaths came from the western state of Maharashtra, said officials at a national control room for the prevention of mosquito-borne illnesses.
Officials had no immediate details about where in the state the deaths occurred.
The new death toll marked the biggest one-day jump in the number of dead from dengue since the outbreak began in mid-August in the country of one billion people.
Nationwide, more than 4,000 people were suffering from the disease, which causes a high fever and internal bleeding, with as many as 1,100 of them in the national capital New Delhi.
At New Delhi’s top public hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Rajkumar Jha had brought in his feverish 16-year-old son for treatment.
“They are only taking the most serious cases inside — the people who are so weak they are falling down,” he told AFP.
The teenager, Vikas, sat listlessly in the hot sun as the pair waited for the results of a blood platelet count test that shows the presence of dengue fever.
Platelets are a type of blood cell which help clotting but they can drop to dangerously low levels as a result of dengue fever, which is transmitted to humans through bites of infected Aedes aegypti mosquitoes.
AIIMS has been thronged by around 900 people daily who fear they have contracted the illness.
But only about 40 to 50 of the patients screened daily were being admitted for dengue, hospital spokesman Shakti Gupta told AFP.
Dengue has hit the Indian capital particularly hard this year with infection rates since mid-August running at nearly quadruple those during the same period last year.
The outbreak, which has been front-page news for days, has alarmed residents who have been rushing out to buy mosquito repellent, driving up sales by as much as 30 per cent, one company official said.
Federal health officials said New Delhi, a city of 14 million, had recorded 23 deaths from dengue.
A dengue outbreak in the capital claimed more than 400 lives in 1996 when 10,000 people fell sick.
The latest death toll came as some states, such as the Himalayan region of Jammu and Kashmir, said they would screen arriving tourists for the illness by checking their temperatures.
There is no specific treatment or vaccine against the illness but early detection can improve the chances of survival.
Elsewhere, the southern state of Kerala has reported 713 cases and four deaths while western Rajasthan reported 328 patients and eight deaths, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.
Cases of dengue have also been reported across the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.
HEALTH MINISTER: India needs to improve public sanitation standards dramatically to prevent outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, the health minister said on Wednesday.
Anbumani Ramadoss’s concern about India’s grubby cities and towns came as officials said the country was also dealing with 1.3 million suspected cases of the disease.
The outbreaks began in late August and health officials have been slammed for not anticipating the dangers of mosquito breeding in stagnant and filthy water collected during the monsoons.—AFP
