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  • 1 year ago
If you have contracted dengue and are experiencing worsening symptoms, you need to get to a hospital as quickly as possible.

The Principal Medical officer of the Ministry of Health says taking this step may be your choice between life and death.

We have more in this report.
Transcript
00:00We've reached 666 confirmed cases and we would see that there was a pattern where we had a lower
00:06number of cases earlier on during the dry season and really from about April go forward we've had
00:13increasing numbers so that the peak of the dengue surge so far has been June-July.
00:22Most of the dengue cases being reported by the Ministry of Health are people under the age of 20.
00:28That's according to Dr. Avery Himes, Technical Director Epidemiology at the Ministry of Health.
00:34He said there are four different subtypes of dengue and currently there are two in circulation.
00:40He added that infection with one strain followed by another strain increases the risk of someone
00:45with chronic disease of being hospitalized and this can even lead to death. He warned
00:51against patients taking a laid-back approach with the virus when they believe that they
00:55have recovered from it. At that point in time what could be happening is that the fever has
01:00gone away but your body has gone into that period where you start losing fluid from your circulatory
01:07system so you go into shock and you start having belly pain, abdominal pain, very severe vomiting,
01:15frequent vomiting, three times in an hour that sort of thing. If you see your fever go away
01:20you're not feeling better and you're having tummy pain or vomiting that's what you call an
01:26emergency sign or warning sign. Dr. Himes said there's a misconception about the way dengue
01:32cases and deaths are reported by the Ministry of Health. In order for a case to be confirmed as a
01:39dengue death there is the clinical aspect where clinical symptoms are taken into account but then
01:45there's also the laboratory confirmation aspect and we have to await the confirmation of dengue
01:52in this clinically suspected case before we count a confirmed death and the issue with that is that
01:59at times because of the testing that needs to be done is something called IgM, enzyme-linked
02:06immunosorbent assay or ELISA testing. The turnaround time for those tests can be up to
02:12about two weeks so sometimes the confirmation may lag behind the event by a little time.
02:20Dr. Miriam Richards, Principal Medical Officer said there are several signs and symptoms
02:25patients and caregivers should look for when someone reports a feeling unwell.
02:30Fever, eye pain which we note in medical terms as retro-orbital pain, severe headaches,
02:38possibly a rash that may be on the skin and it's a fine viral rash which we call a viral
02:44axanthema. It also includes severe body pain and muscular pain, nausea with vomiting or without
02:53and diarrhea. She also appealed to people suffering with low blood pressure that may
02:58contract dengue to get to the nearest hospital as soon as possible. So basically what happens
03:04is that your blood pressure drops suddenly and significantly so it can't support our body
03:11and that results in the need for fluids what we what we term inotropes and ICU admission.
03:17Persons can also experience hemorrhagic symptoms which means that they start bleeding
03:24and that causes a drop in blood pressure. Sharla Kistu, TV6 News.
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