Diagnosis Rate: Dengue infections down 24% in three weeks

LAHORE:

The number of people being diagnosed with dengue every day has fallen by 24 per cent over the last three weeks, said Agriculture Secretary Arif Nadeem on Monday in the daily dengue briefing at King Edward Medical University.

Nadeem said that the insecticide spray campaign had succeeded in controlling the mosquito population. He said agriculture and health department experts were monitoring insect populations and checking tyre shops, nurseries and other breeding hot spots.

He said that uniform treatment guidelines had been formulated by senior health department consultants in light of recommendations made by Sri Lankan and Indonesian medical experts, and these had ensured that a large number of patients recovered from the disease.

He said that 15,226 patients had so far recovered from the disease and been discharged from hospitals in Punjab, including 13,142 in Lahore. He said 198 patients had been diagnosed with dengue in Punjab in the last 24 hours, including 150 in Lahore.

The total number of dengue infections has reached 15,433, of which 13,297 were in Lahore. A total of 1,500 patients are under treatment in hospitals in Punjab, 1,207 of them in Lahore. Seven people died of dengue in the last 24 hours, taking the Punjab-wide death toll to 202 and the Lahore count to 181.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 11^th, 2011.