ISLAMABAD: As many as 400 employees of District Health Office (DHO) Islamabad has been tasked with destroying the dengue larva, District Health Officer Dr Zaeem Zia said on Sunday.

Moreover, he also urged residents of Islamabad to play their role in eliminating dengue mosquito breeding sites.

Talking to Dawn, Dr Zaeem Zia said teams consisting of DHO employees visited 2,629 houses on May 6 and 7 and revisited 60 houses to ensure that the directions given by the teams are implemented.

“Seven pools of stagnant water were dried and out of 820 open water containers, 704 were covered. As many as 236 water containers were also destroyed. At two places larva of dengue was found and 544 potential breeding sites were eliminated in just two days,” he said.

Dr Zia said that during the two days as many as 2,629 lectures were given to people to convince and guide them to eliminate breeding sites of mosquito.

“Only four cases of dengue have so far been reported out of which three came from urban and one from rural areas,” he said.

Though it is a small number, we cannot take the situation lightly as like two years ago things can get worse, he said.

In 2019, 50,000 cases of the mosquito borne disease were reported, which were all time high, taking around 100 lives across the country.

Last time the maximum cases were reported in 2011, when 27,000 people were infected with the dengue, which claimed 370 patients lives which were over four times higher than the death toll reported in 2019.

Dengue is spread by the mosquito bite and patients face deficiency of platelets due to which transfusion of platelets is required as patient’s blood loses the normal clotting ability. If timely treatment is not provided, the disease may turn into life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever, which may lead to bleeding, low levels of platelets and blood plasma leakage, or to dengue shock syndrome– a dangerously low blood pressure.

Pakistan has experienced many dengue outbreaks since the first outbreak in 1994.

During the last two decades two major outbreaks were reported in Pakistan, first in 2005 when 6,000 cases with 52 deaths were reported from Karachi. However, in 2011, more than 21,000 cases were reported from Lahore with 350 deaths.

Moreover, between 2011 and 2014 more than 48,000 confirmed cases of dengue came from across the country.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2022