In bed 16 of the measles ward at Bangladesh Shishu Hospital and Institute on Saturday morning lay 11-month-old Mustab, an oxygen tube in his nose. He was due to be moved to the paediatric intensive care unit, but nurses could not find a vein for a cannula as his mother, Rima Akter, wept. Five and a half months on, hospitals are still full of measles patients.
The hospital still has 98 children admitted with measles-related illness. It has treated 2,989 children this year, and 94 have died, two of them in the last 24 hours. Monthly admissions were 2 in January, 6 in February, 130 in March, 328 in April, 499 in May, 534 in June, 501 in July, 497 in August and 466 in September, with 26 so far in October.
By age, 630 patients were six months old, 949 were six to nine months, 778 were nine months to two years, 353 were two to five years and 279 were five years old, so most were close to the age of routine vaccination.
The Directorate General of Health Services reported on Saturday that eight more children had died of measles or its symptoms in the previous 24 hours, bringing child deaths to 1,122. Dengue killed six people in the same period, with 1,608 new cases; 256 people have died of dengue this year.
Professor A B M Abdullah, a medicine specialist, told Ittefaq that dengue has changed its behaviour. It now comes with a mild fever of 101 or 102 degrees and often no rash, so people ignore it and patients suddenly go into shock. A second infection is especially dangerous, he said. He advised testing for dengue even with a mild fever, cold or cough, and taking particular care of children, older people, pregnant women and people with cancer, heart or kidney disease.
The report is by Ittefaq's Morsheda Yasmin Piu.
Photo: Wasiul Bahar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Ittefaq
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