KARACHI: Provincial health authorities on Tuesday confirmed the year’s first death caused by dengue virus, and identified a boy of Orangi Town as the victim.

Officials in the provincial dengue control and prevention programme said the 10-year-old boy was admitted to a private hospital on May 22 in a precarious condition and a couple of days later he died.

Dr Shakeel Aamir Mullick, who heads the dengue control and prevention programme, said the management of the private hospital where the boy died confirmed to him the dengue death on Tuesday.

The doctors told the provincial authorities that they received the boy when the infection had attained serious complications, causing his death after a couple of days of medication.

“This is the first death [of 2015] because of dengue infection,” said Dr Mullick.

According to the data compiled by the provincial programme, 370 dengue cases have been reported in Sindh this year.

Of them, 360 cases have been reported in Karachi, three cases came from Hub district of Balochistan and the remaining seven cases have been reported from the rest of the province, including two from Hyderabad.

Last year, more than 1,295 cases of dengue fever were reported in Sindh, of which 1,277 belonged to Karachi. Some 17 dengue patients died of the disease.

In 2013, more than 6,000 dengue patients were reported, of whom 32 died.

On dengue infection in children, officials said there was a slight variation in signs and symptoms of dengue in young and adult victims. They might have diarrhoea and gastroenteritis with fever, eating disorder and abdominal pain.

Officials have identified North Nazimabad, SITE, Clifton, Saddar Town, North Karachi and New Karachi as the “vulnerable areas” for dengue meriting “special attention”.

The lethal virus is difficult to rein in despite the authorities’ claim that they had taken “unprecedented” steps this year to control dengue virus in Sindh, with special attention to Karachi.

Official figures show that dengue fever’s first incidence in Karachi was reported in 1994 when 145 confirmed cases were recorded, of whom one victim had died.

The disease hibernated since then till 2005, when the authorities recorded 258 cases, of which 16 had died. The deadliest year was 2006 in which 49 of the 1,500 patients died.

The authorities then turned to an efficient mode in the next two years, during which 20 people died out of the 931 confirmed cases.

Since 2009 when the city had last seen a local government, 92 people of the around 12,000 confirmed cases died.

Officials said of the 190 people who had died so far because of the deadly tropical disease in Sindh, more than 60 per cent were aged between 20 and 34 years. Some 20 per cent of them were aged 35 years or more while the rest were children or teens.

Transmitted by the bite of a female mosquito, the disease is occurring more widely due to increased movement of people and goods — including carrier objects such as bamboo plants and used tyres — as well as floods linked to climate change, the United Nations agency said.

Published in Dawn, May 27th, 2015

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