In a serious turn of events, the number of dengue cases in the national capital have doubled in
a week with the first week of august recording the highest number of dengue cases reported in
the past five years. Every subsequent week of August has witnessed the number of dengue
cases being doubled indicating the worsening of situation in Delhi. This has sparked grave
concerns among the health officials who are promptly working to contain the outbreak of the
disease.
According to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s (MCD) latest report on vector-borne diseases
released on Monday, the number of dengue cases in Delhi surged from 56 cases to 105 cases
in a week. A total of 348 cases of dengue have been reported so far in Delhi with July recording
121 cases, June recording 40 cases and May recording 23 cases. In comparison to this year’s
record of cases, the city recorded 169 cases in 2022, 52 cases in 2021 and 31 cases in 2020,
all recorded between January 1 and July 28 of each corresponding year.
In the past week, MCD conducted 973 blood slide examinations with 1,142 examination rounds
being conducted the week before. Roughly 46,000 houses have been sprayed in the past 1
week and 56,000 houses were sprayed a week before that. However, the number of house
visits aimed at checking breeding grounds of mosquitoes have reduced from 9.5 lakhs to 5.7
lakhs last week.
Health experts attribute the rapid rise in dengue cases to a combination of flooding and water
logging problems in the city with better reporting of the cases after it got declared a notifiable
disease last year.
Type 2 Dengue Virus
Delhi government’s health department conducted genome sequencing of dengue virus and
found 19 out of 20 samples being detected with type 2 dengue virus which is considered to be
the most harmful as there are no direct medicines for this strain and health officials usually work
on managing the complications arising from it.
Actions Taken So Far
On Friday, Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal reviewed the situation of dengue. Fines for
unchecked mosquito breeding have been raised to ₹1000 for households and ₹5000 for
commercial warehouses. Earlier this year, The Delhi government had announced its launch of
vector borne disease control action plan which included the use of drones for mosquito
surveillance in endangered areas. In association with ASHA workers, the Delhi government is
also raising awareness about the prevention measures for the same.
