With a change in climate, the district health department is undertaking awareness drive among mass including street vendors, tyre shops, coconut sellers and the tea stalls apart from rag pickers as precautionary measures against dengue.
Use insect repellent, wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants, and control mosquitoes inside and outside your home. Avoid dengue by preventing mosquito bites, said Dr Arjun Prasad Civil Surgeon (in-charge) Bokaro.
Amidst door-to-door awareness programmes being initiated by the National Urban Health Mission, we are pressing out health workers into service for mass awareness. We are also concentrating on the vendors. We are instructing them to cover their goods with plastic sheets to prevent mosquito breeding, he said.
“We have sought public support in controlling the menace of vector-borne diseases and also sent a letter to the civic body for participating in the campaign to fight against it,” he added.
Dengue fever (DF) is a viral disease transmitted by infected mosquitoes. DF causes severe, flu-like symptoms with high fever and extreme muscle and joint pain. Dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) and dengue shock syndrome (DSS) are less common but more severe forms of the disease. DHF or DSS initially present with very similar symptoms to DF. The disease then progresses to a stage where the blood vessels become permeable causing a breakdown of the circulatory system, fluid loss, and possibly death, he said.
Civil Surgeon said, few people generally use mosquito repellents at night, but due to changes in climatic conditions, they must use it during the day hours too as the Aedes mosquito bites in the daytime too.
Precautionary measures are being taken to control dengue in the district. This is not the time for fogging, because the smoke actually hits the trees where the mosquitoes sit, and at this time, they are not found there. Though, we will send our teams soon for fogging and to conduct surveys in the city as well as villages, he said.
Speaking about the signs and symptoms of dengue a medical expert of the health department said, most people infected have found mild or no symptoms, about one among four people infected with dengue will get sick.
Mild symptoms of dengue may be confused with other illnesses that cause fever and flu-like illness, he said.
When the disease gets widespread, many private clinics start testing dengue. They generally do the NSI-slide test and show an alarming rate in increase of dengue. But, that is not true. The Elisa test is the most accurate, and the slide test number dramatically drops when the Elisa test is done, said the medical expert.
