New Delhi facing significant outbreak of disease

The warm summer months are the season when mosquitoes come out to play across much of the northern hemisphere and in the capital city we are being plagued by a disease that has become prevalent in over 100 countries across the world, the cursed and sometimes deadly dengue fever.

Dengue fever is an acute febrile disease, which means it commonly presents itself as a fever with associated symptoms such as an elevated temperature, shivering and cold and hot flushes. The disease is carried by the Stegomyia mosquito and in India’s capital city there has already been one death due to the fever, that of a young child in July.

The outbreak of dengue in New Delhi began to present a nightmare scenario for city officials are keen to keep all preparations for the Commonwealth Games on track, the increasing number of people being reported as carrying the disease was giving New Delhi a negative perception in the foreign press, but it is important to remember that the disease is not isolated to New Delhi or India.

According to the World Health Organization, the disease is endemic in over 100 countries in the world, predominantly those located around the tropical belt of the world and around 2.5 billion people are at risk, with around 50 million infected every year.

The outbreak in New Delhi this season progressed with concerning speed and seemed to catch health officials off guard in the nation’s commercial and political heartland. On July 27^th, New Delhi news media reported that three cases had been discovered that day, which brought the total number known to be infected in the city to 31.

By July 31^st, just a few days later, the number of total people infected had risen to 52, following an announcement by New Delhi news media that 6 new cases of infection were reported that day. Such figures loosely suggest that the infection rate has doubled in just a few days, revealing the severity and seriousness of the lens through which this disease must be viewed.

Indeed this was the reaction of both the media and public officials, 2010 has become the year in which the greatest outbreak of the disease has occurred since 2006. In fact, 2010’s number of dengue cases has increase by 15 times compared to figures from the same period last year.

Part of the problem is that testing for dengue fever takes several days, so any official figures released by a hospital may be several days out of date and this can be the difference between current and obsolete in terms of dengue fever, which is a very fast and virulent disease. The lag in testing also presents another problem.

“MCD does not accept a case of dengue until it gets a positive dengue serology report,” Dr. K.K. Aggarwal told New Delhi news media. “These test positive only five days after the onset of fever, so many cases are missed.”

It is therefore difficult to administer timely treatment and some patients may be overlooked by hospitals operating at full or over-capacity levels as the outbreak spreads.

However, it should be noted that although 2010’s outbreak looks set to break recent records, training of doctors and the implementation of better case management programs have decreased the overall fatality rate from over 4% in 1996 to just 1.5% at present. This means that around 1.5% of those infected will die from the disease.

As part of ongoing efforts to bring this rate down further, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi announced recently that they were implementing a training program to better manage the treatment of the disease across 34 government hospitals in the city.