Two persons died in Beliaghata I.D. Hospital from dengue on Friday. The deceased are residents of Habra and Rajarhat. Another person died in Tangra on Thursday. This takes the death toll from dengue up to six in the past three days in Kolkata and adjoining areas.
Earlier last week, an official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation died at Ruby General Hospital. Officially, over 24,000 persons have been affected with dengue in West Bengal this year so far.
Meanwhile, the Gokhale Memorial Girls’ School remained closed today as the KMC conducted a cleanliness drive in the area. Parents put up a demonstration outside the school on Thursday after some students from the school were found infected with dengue over the past few weeks. The guardians said that students were falling ill because of the unclean surroundings. They demanded the school to remain closed till adequate measures had been taken.
There has been a sudden rise in the number of dengue cases from Kolkata, Salt Lake and Howrah since late September, despite the nip in the air. Usually, the disease-spreading mosquitoes die with the onset of winter. But there has been no improvement in the situation so far.
Doctors say that the disease is changing character which is reflected by the fact that in case of the past few deaths in and around Kolkata, the platelet count of the dengue victims was sufficiently high. Generally, a sharply declining platelet count is taken to be a significant feature. Doctors have found that in some such cases, despite normal count, platelets were not functioning normally.
The experts are indicating that dengue-causing pathogen tends to behave differently during each outbreak, possibly because it evolves due to mutation. A mutated pathogen elicits even more aggressive reactivity by the body to resist it. This is reflected in the abnormally high ferritin levels. High ferritin levels lead to multi-organ failure which has consistently been cited in several of the deaths from dengue in the last few days.
