The menace of dengue is continuing to haunt the residents of provisional state capital Dehradun and nearby areas. On Thursday the state health department reported 38 new cases of the vector borne disease. With these cases the number of the patients affected by the disease mounted to 519.
The district vector borne disease officer, Subhash Joshi said that a team of health department visited Bengali Basti and Maya kund areas of Rishikesh on Thursday.
He said that 32 students of AIIMS, Rishikesh and their teachers also accompanied the team of the department in creating awareness about the disease. Joshi claimed that survey of 320 houses in these two localities was done on the day.
Joshi claimed that activities like fogging and spread of insecticides are being undertaken apart from spreading awareness on preventive measures to be adopted for the disease and source reduction activities.
He added that Aedes mosquitoes - the vector of dengue- are capable to lay their eggs in one spoonful of water so the pots, vases, water bottles and coolers should be decanted regularly.
The symptoms of Dengue are persistently high fever, rashes, headache and pain in the joints. In the acute cases the platelets number decrease drastically which could prove fatal for the patient.
The Tiger mosquito (called due to the characteristic stripes on its body) is responsible for transmitting the virus from one person to another.
