Maryam, a 7-year-old child, has been fighting with dengue in the hospital bed for 9 days. Although her condition worsened Maryam's mother could not manage an ICU bed for her, rather waited for the girl to recover. Many more children like Maryam are now spending their days in hospital beds.
The Report obtained a statistic of how many children like Maryam were infected with dengue from Dhaka Children's Hospital.
According to the data, 489 children have been infected with dengue so far while the figure was 365 10 days back. In other words, 124 children have been admitted to the hospital in the last 10 days.
Maryam is one of these 124 children. Speaking to The Report, her mother Khadija said, 'I could not get him admitted to ICU due to lack of money. So she is being treated here. God saved her. She is a little healthy now '.
Asked about the mosquito infestation in their area, Khadija said, "No steps have been taken to control mosquitoes in the area. I just see that it goes with smoke and kerosene. Children can't play outside because of mosquito bites.”
Like Maryam, Mahfuz (10) is now spending days in the hospital where he was supposed to play on the field. He was admitted to the hospital on August 22. He was shifted to the ICU for two days in the meantime.
Mahfuz's mother Afsara was talking about the hardships. “It’s too hard to stay at home due to mosquitoes. I keep the windows and doors closed all the time so that mosquitoes cannot enter. Even then I could not save my son. I had to take him to ICU a few days ago, now his situation is improved a bit,” Afsara told The Report.
Out of 489 children like Maryam and Mahfuz, 135 infected children hail from Mirpur in the capital alone. Therefore, the hospital authorities claim that Mirpur is still a hot spot of dengue.
The hospital and medical staffs are facing additional pressure in the ICU, said deputy director of the children's hospital Prabir Kumar Sarkar.
"We are facing a dire situation," he told The Report. “Every day 10-15 new patients are admitted and a total of 50/60 patients are staying in the hospital regularly. Most of the patients are in critical condition. In the last two months, we have admitted more than 400 patients. The highest number of patients was admitted in August.”
"There is a lot of pressure on the ICU. At least six patients in every 10 have to shift to ICU. Because, everyone who is admitted is being admitted with critical condition. ICU support has to be given to those who are not recovering from Compensated shock and are going towards decompression,” Prabi furthered.
As many as 14 children were admitted to Dhaka Children's Hospital with dengue fever on Wednesday. Of them seven reside in same ward of Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC)
The authorities are yet to take any move to curb mosquito infestation in the ward, residents alleged.
However, the DNCC ward-12 councilor Murad Hossain claims to have launched mosquito eradication drives day and night.
"Mosquitoes would be more in number unless we took significantly curbing measures," he told The Report.
Nonetheless, mosquitoes are biting one or two, resulting in them being infected. We can't stop these, but we are trying. Our only goal now is to do research and work on it day and night until winter comes.
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