LAHORE: The Punjab government has declared a medical emergency at public health facilities in Lahore due to the rising number of dengue cases amid rainy weather, provincial health officials confirmed while talking to Arab News on Saturday.
The decision was made at a meeting chaired by the Punjab health minister Dr. Yasmeen Rashid on Friday which looked into the challenge of preventing the rapid breeding of mosquitoes in the province and expressed concern over a possible deterioration of dengue situation in the coming weeks.
The provincial health department also instructed all doctors on leave to return to their respective medical facilities to deal with the growing number of dengue cases reported in Punjab.
“Recent rain spells coupled with humidity and a lot of construction work in some of the top neighborhoods of Lahore have provided a breeding ground for dengue that has engulfed much of the city and its adjoining areas,” the provincial health secretary of Punjab Imran Sikandar Baloch told Arab News.
Dengue is a threat to nearly half of the world’s population. Of the estimated 220 million people infected each year, two million, mostly children in Latin America and Asia, develop its severe form called dengue hemorrhagic fever.
There is no specific treatment for the disease, though its early detection can help its treatment.
According to the latest health department figures, 299 dengue cases have been reported in the province in the last 24 hours. About 220 of these cases were only recorded in Lahore while the remaining ones were diagnosed in other parts of the province.
Statistics reveal that dengue cases in Punjab have reached 3,475 since January 2021, with Lahore accounting for 2,708 of them.
Officials say field surveillance revealed the breeding of larvae at 2,580 places across the province, adding that 1,530 of them were spotted in Lahore.
The Punjab health secretary maintained the climatic conditions that created conducive environment for the spread of the disease were likely to continue until the end of the year.
Rejecting the claim that official surveillance teams were not doing their job, Baloch said the COVID-19 pandemic had already placed immense pressure on the province’s health system.
“The same medical staff is also dealing with the dengue situation,” he added.
In 2019, Rawalpindi was devastated by the disease after the city reported over 7,000 cases.
According to some senior officials at the provincial health department, the number of dengue cases could go up to 10,000 by the end of December before subsiding.
The situation is also causing concern among health officials in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where 304 cases have been reported in the last 24 hours.
Dengue outbreak has also been witnessed in the country’s southeastern Sindh province where more than 700 cases have been reported only in the port city of Karachi since the beginning of the month.
According to health experts, 80 percent of patients are those who already contracted the disease last year.
Balochistan is Pakistan’s only federating unit that has not reported a single dengue case this year.
The Pakistan Medical Association’s secretary general Dr. Qaisar Sajjad recently told Arab News the government was downplaying the problem by sharing conservative numbers of the diagnosed disease cases,
There are over a million dengue cases across the world, with about 0.7 million of them reported in Brazil.