This story is from November 16, 2017

Malaria adds sting to dengue torment

Malaria adds sting to dengue torment
KOLKATA: When the health department and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation are battling the dengue outbreak, the city has been hit by another vector-borne disease — malaria. On Wednesday, a 56-year-old man succumbed to dengue in the northern fringes of the city and malaria claimed the life of a 50-year-old woman in south Kolkata.
Kasba resident Sona Singh died at Sambhunath Pandit Hospital where she was being treated for the past few days.
According to her family, when Singh started complaining of fever they were scared that it could be dengue. But her blood sample reports threw up a surprise.
They took her to hospital after receiving a malaria-positive report.
Though the death certificate mentions malaria-positive, the document states that she died due to septicaemia. Doctors said that the patient had other co-morbid conditions and there was no improvement in her health desp-ite treatment.
“The patient was admitted on Sunday. This was a case of vivax malaria. But the patient had other health complications that aggravated the condition. She died due to septicemia,” said a source at Sambhunath Pan-dit Hospital.
Locals in Kasba said that even before the dengue outbreak, the area had been plagued by the malaria problem. They also alleged that the civic body did not take up mosquito-control exercises in time and on a regular basis. Singh’s house on 130, Bose Pukur Road is barely a kilometre from BB Chaterjee Road from where the city’s first dengue death had been reported in September.

On Wednesday, Bimal Roy of Kestopur died in South Dum Dum Municipality hospital at Nager Bazar. Roy was diagnosed with dengue about nine days ago.
His family initially had admitted him in a private hospital in Baguiati. He was put on ventilation from day one since his platelet count had dropped to an alarming level and his other parameters, too, were not good.
“Despite the treatment and platelet infusion, there was no improvement. Since he was on ventilation in the ICU we could not bear the treatment cost any longer. So we shifted him to the hospital run by South Dum Dum Municipality,” said a family member.
Roy was shifted to Nager Bazar hospital only on Tuesday. His condition deteriorated further and he died on Wednesday morning. His death certificate mentions multi-organ failure in a case of NS1 positive as the cause of the death.
The Kestopur locality where Roy lived has seen at least a dozen fever deaths, mostly due to dengue, this year. The area under Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation is also close to Pramod Nagar in New Town that has also had many fever deaths.
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