Alert! Dengue on the prowl
Due to climate changes and increasing contamination, infectious diseases are on the rise. Dengue is one among them. Due to the lack of awareness, people often mistake the dengue fever with the seasonal fever, which can eventually turn life threatening. Few important considerations;
Causes and symptoms of dengue:
Dengue fever is an infectious disease transmitted through mosquito bites. Dengue is caused by a species of mosquitoes having four kinds of viruses. However, a person suffering from dengue shows the symptoms of high fever, severe headache, body ache, joints ache, nausea, vomiting and reddish eruptions all over the skin. A person detected with these symptoms should be taken for treatment immediately.
Ignoring these symptoms can further cause dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), which is often complicated and severe. In this stage, a person experiences blackish blood stool, along with internal hemorrhage, nose and gum bleeding, decrease of blood pressure and reduction of platelets. The platelets in an affected person reduce from 1.5 lakh to 50,000 per cubic millimeter. This sudden reduction in the platelets can lead to coagulation defect (blood clotting ceases). A normal dengue infection can persist up to 10-15 days and severe conditions of this fever can last up to one month. This fever can spread to any age group perhaps; children are quite vulnerable as they have soft skin.
How to fight dengue?
Only way to fight dengue is to prevent the disease. One should avoid using stagnant water and if found, put some drops of either petrol or kerosene oil into it.
The dengue mosquito attacks during the day and the malaria mosquito during the night. To avoid both these diseases, it is important that a person wears full clothes and uses mosquito nets and mosquito repellents.
An affected person should take intravenous fluid to balance electrolyte loss and in case of the reduction of platelets, the patient should be transfused with extra platelets. However, a person should remember that the shelf life of platelets is only four days and the patient should arrange suitable platelets beforehand.
Simple tips to prevent dengue:
* Avoid mosquito bites by using mosquito nets and mosquito repellents
* Avoid stagnant water at home or workplace and the vicinity
* Clean drains and other areas wherein the water flows
* Install meshes to all the windows in your home
* Wear full clothes always
* For water used indoors like in a vase or any other decorative item, change the water every day after scrubbing the vase or the container
* Add prescribed amounts of sand granular insecticide into vases, gully traps and roof gutters, even if they are dry
* Get your home and surrounding areas sprayed often.
* One of the safest medicines to be taken to cure dengue is Paracetamol.
