The toll of infected people admitted in hospitals outnumbers those with Covid-19. Doctors said there were probably thousands more patients recovering or being treated at home.

At first, epidemiologists thought it was a new strain of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, but symptoms were quite different – severe body aches, eye pain, high fever and nausea.

Dengue is transmitted from one infected person to another through the bites of Aedes aegyti mosquitoes and is caused by four different virus serotypes.

Dengue-infected people with one serotype of the virus will not have immunity to the other three types and multiple infections can occur. Also called “broken-bone fever”, it is caught three to seven days after the mosquito bite, and high fever usually lasts up to a week.

There is no treatment for dengue, as antibiotics are not effective against the virus, and doctors recommend to take Paracetamol as painkiller, as well as drinking as much water as possible, while more severe cases can show internal bleeding and require hospitalization.

Sher Bahadur Pun, head of the Clinical Research Unit at the Shukraraj Hospital for Tropical and Communicable Diseases, warned of the need to take measures to avoid mosquito bites at schools, offices and homes, and also noted that certain painkillers and antibiotics can worsen patient´s health condition.

pll/acl/abm