6-year-old girl dies of dengue in Belagavi

Belagavi: A six-year-old girl undergoing treatment for dengue at KLE Hospital died here on Saturday. Arati Choudappa Vallepurkar, a resident of Teggin Galli, was suffering from fever since the past one week. With her condition turning severe, Arati was shifted from Sai Nursing Home at Vadagavi to KLE.
Arati's unemployed father is physically disabled and the family of four totally depends on the earnings of her mother, a daily-wage worker in an unorganized sector.She had joined class I in the Government Kannada Medium School No. 5 at Vadagavi on June 1.
Belagavi City Corporation (BCC) Commissioner, G Prabhu, district health officer Dr Appasab Naratti and BCC health department officers visited the family's locality where local residents and area corporator Ramesh Sontakki took them to task for the pitiable state of the ward. Health department officials made a futile attempt to claim that the death was not due to dengue. They were left embarrassed when medial reports stated the cause of the death as dengue.
Sontakki, who is also the leader of opposition in the city corporation, said that hundreds of people in Vadagavi are suffering from dengue and other water-borne diseases since two months.
Hazardous effects of storing water
About 25 persons in the area were found to be dengue-affected last month. Till now, over 350 dengue suspects have been admitted to the Civil Hospital. The number is said to be increasing by the day.
The health department collected 118 samples from January and 62 were found to be dengue positive. The number of people suffering from dengue is more in May-June. Unconfirmed figures put the number of dengue patients in the district at over 500. The number of dengue suspects is more in Ramdurg and Belagavi taluks where the health department is actively carrying out awareness programmes.
Health department officials attributed the spread of dengue to storage of water. With the water level low at Rakaskop reservoir, water is being supplied once a week. In some other areas, the supply is one a fortnight. Hence, the residents have no other options but to store water. However, this helps in the multiplication of larvae. People also rely on open wells where the water is contaminated due to mixing of drain water. Also, garbage dumped on the roadsides is not cleared for a long time, contributing to the factors responsible to spread dengue.
The deputy commissioner has strictly directed officials of the health department to clean drains and take up awareness rallies alerting people to drink only boiled water. DHO Naratti said that all measures are being taken up to control dengue and cholera. He urged people not to store water for more than three days and keep the surrounding clean. "The corporation has been instructed to lift garbage regularly and conduct fogging in every area," he said.