Diarrhoea soars as heat wave grips country

With scorching heat searing the country for the past few days, hospitals all around continued to receive higher numbers of diarrhoea patients.
Reports received from different parts of the country said the most of the patients belong to the poor working class, who reported that they had taken roadside food or drinks during the ongoing heat spell.
The Bangladesh Meteorological Department forecast on Friday said ‘Severe heat wave is sweeping over Rajshahi and Kushtia regions. Mild to moderate heat wave is sweeping over the remaining part of Rajshahi and Khulna divisions and the regions of Dhaka, Tangail, Faridpur, Madaripur, Gopalgonj, Rangamati, Chandpur, Noakhali, Dinajpur, Sayedpur, Barisal, Patuakhali and Bhola, and it may continue.’
Shopkeepers at drug stores and groceries said that their sale of oral saline – an essential medicine to check dehydration caused by heat or diarrhoea – had skyrocketed.
Health experts said many people unknowingly take contaminated food and drink water or squash from roadside shops, in the scorching heat, and suffer from diarrhea.
The International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh’s Dhaka (icddr,b) hospital’s senior medical officer SM Rafiqul Islam suggested people drink safe water and avoid roadside food and drinks to remain safe in this weather.
He suggested working people carry only two liters of safe water from home and drink it throughout the day to avoid the disease.
‘Personal hygiene is also important. Washing hands with soap before taking meals and after using toilet can reduce almost 80 per cent of diarrhea,’ he said.
The icddr,b data show that the rush of patients increased gradually in April.
According to the data, the hospital received 320 patients on the first day of the month but it received an average of 366 patients a day in the first week until April 7, an average of 437 patients a day in the second week from April 8 to April 14 and an average of 488 patients a day in the third week from April 15 to April 21.
In the six days until April 27, the hospital received a total of 2,864 patients or an average of 477 patients a day.
On normal days, the hospital receives 300 to 325 patients a day, officials said.
Officials at the National Health Crisis Management Centre and Control Room of the Directorate General of Health Services said that they received information of 5,804 infected patients in seven days until April 27 from different parts of the country.
According to the control room data, 5,082 patients were reportedly admitted by the hospitals in seven days ending April 20.
The data, however, do not show the exact number of patients admitted to the hospitals as many hospitals do not report on a daily basis, DGHS officials said.
They said that with the increase in heat, the infected areas have been increasing.
A patient at icddr,b, Md Shamim, who earns his livelihood by paddling a rickshaw, said that he drank four glasses of lemon squash and a plate of watermelon from different roadside places in the capital before he fell sick Tuesday evening.
Md Ismail Hossain, a grocer at city’s Rajarbagh area, told New Age that he had been selling around 80 packets of oral saline everyday though the sale was almost one-third of that in late March.

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net