Hospitals in Bangladesh recorded Wednesday 2,367 new cases of dengue fever in the latest daily count, taking the tally of infections since January to 121,500, reports bdnews24.com.
The death toll from the mosquito-borne disease increased by seven to 576 in the 24 hours to Wednesday morning, the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) said.
Hospitals in Dhaka admitted 899 new dengue patients in this period, and reported five deaths.
The number of new cases outside the capital was 1,468, with two fatalities.
As many as 8,446 dengue patients were under hospital care across the country in the morning, and 4,538 of them were outside Dhaka.
Last year, hospitals reported 62,382 patients taking medical care, and the death toll stood at 281, the previous highest since record-keeping began for dengue hospitalisations in the 1960s.
In 2019, Bangladesh witnessed 101,354 dengue hospitalisations, the previous record number of cases in a single year. The official death toll that year was recorded at 179.
A pre-monsoon government-funded survey of Dhaka city has uncovered an alarming surge of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, known carriers of the dengue virus, fuelling the worst spread of the disease over the past five years.
Most of the deaths caused by dengue occurred due to haemorrhagic fever and shock syndrome, which health experts associated with some new variants of the deadly virus, previously undetected in Bangladesh.
