Three virus-borne diseases, Dengue, Covid-19 and Chikungunya, are currently spreading simultaneously in Bangladesh, posing a severe public health crisis.
Public health professionals say that the presence of the three diseases with similar symptoms, fever and body pain, makes early diagnosis difficult and causes delays in providing treatment.
As a result, when a patient with fever and body pain comes to a medical facility, doctors often recommend tests needed to detect the three infections. It increases the patients鈥� financial burden and causes delays in critical medical intervention.
The simultaneous spread is also straining hospital resources not only because of the volume of the patients but also due to different management protocols required for treating patients infected with each of the three viruses.
Bangladesh Medical University鈥檚 former vice-chancellor and virologist Nazrul Islam said that multiple viruses might exist in a society at a time but if one person gets infected with more viruses that increase more life risk for that patient.
He said that the presence of three viruses at a time would be a huge burden for hospitals while they struggle to serve the patients infected by a single virus.
鈥極ur hospital management is not good. Patients with one virus infection may get infected by another even in the hospitals,鈥� he added.
The presence of multiple virus infections at the same time in a society increases the risk of death due to late start of treatment and confusion about the diseases, experts said.
DGHS line director for hospitals Abu Hussain Md Moinul Ahsan said that they had instructed hospitals to ensure treatment of all sorts of diseases at a time.
He said that the treatment and symptoms of the three diseases were almost the same.
Dengue and Chikungunya are spread by mosquitoes while Covid virus can spread from an infected person鈥檚 mouth or nose in small liquid particles when they cough, sneeze, speak, sing, or breath.
Ibn Sina Medical College Hospital鈥檚 associate professor and medicine expert Kamruzzaman Mazumder said that patients with fever and body pain were advised for tests needed to detect the presence of the three viruses as symptoms of the three diseases were almost the same.
In Bangladesh, hospitals treat Covid patients at dedicated wards to stop its easy spreading.
The Directorate General of Health Services has been collecting information about dengue and Covid patients admitted to and died in hospitals across the country. They are still ignoring Chikungunya.
According to the DGHS, the country detected at least 26 Covid cases in the past 24 hours till 8:00am on Wednesday.
With the latest cases, the country has so far recorded 499 Covid cases and 19 Covid deaths this year.
During the same period, the country recorded hospitalisation of 8,870 dengue patients and 36 dengue deaths including the latest two deaths on Wednesday.
The DGHS is not collecting data on Chikungunya. So, there is no nationally representative information on Chikungunya.
However, the Institute of Epidemiology, Disease Control and Research tested 337 samples and confirmed 153 cases of Chikungunya between January 1 and May 28 this year. All the cases were reported in Dhaka.
In December 2024, IEDCR reported 11 cases of Zika virus and 67 cases of chikungunya.
The DGHS line director for the communicable disease wing, Halimur Rashid, said that since the Aedes mosquito is the primary carrier or vector of the dengue virus and Chikungunya virus, there was no need to take different measures to provide treatment for the patients infected with any of the two viruses.
A dengue outbreak was first officially reported in the country in 2000 when 93 people died and 5,551 patients were hospitalised, according to DGHS data.
Dengue killed 1,705 people and sent 3, 21,179 others to hospitals in 2023 alone against 853 deaths and 2, 44,246 hospitalisation between 2000 and 2022, the DGHS data showed.
In 2024, the country witnessed a severe dengue outbreak that resulted in 575 deaths and 101,214 reported cases.
Bangladesh first detected Covid-19 in the country on March 8, 2020.
So far, 29,502 people have died of Covid-19 in Bangladesh, according to the official account, and the cumulative number of Covid patients has reached 20,51,800.
In 2017, Bangladesh experienced a large-scale outbreak of chikungunya. The outbreak was particularly severe in Dhaka and affected 17 districts, out of the country鈥檚 64 districts.
The Ministry of Health reported over 13,176 clinically confirmed cases between April and September of that year.
