KARACHI, July 30: In the wake of the latest detections of dengue fever and a couple of subsequent deaths, the health department of the City District Government Karachi has once again begun distributing specially medicated mosquito nets to government hospitals to provide protection to patients already bitten by the disease-spreading Aedes egypti mosquitoes.

The executive district officer (health) of the city district government, Dr A.D. Sajnani, told Dawn on Wednesday that the nets were received from the federal health ministry last year and his department had passed them on to Abbasi, Jinnah and Civil hospitals.

“We have again informed the hospitals run in the public sector to collect the medicated nets and ensure that they are handed over to patients admitted for treatment of the mosquito-borne disease and are tested positive for dengue fever,” he said, adding that the nets given to hospitals last time were used against mosquitoes in different wards, including isolation wards of the hospital where dengue patients were admitted for treatment.

“Dengue patients will also receive the mosquito nets upon being discharged from hospitals,” he said.

In five months after the outbreak of dengue fever last year, about 2,600 people had reported to major government and private hospitals for treatment of the disease and 22 had died of it. This year, when the city had not yet received the monsoon rains, two dengue patients had died till July 24, in a span of a month, at the Abbasi Shaheed Hospital.

According to Dr Sajnani, the importance of protective measures, including the use of mosquito nets, particularly by those who had already experienced the dengue fever had arisen considerably, particularly in a situation when the Karachiites had received the first spell of monsoon rains on July 30.

“We have very recently handed over the medicated mosquito nets to the Abbasi Shaheed, Jinnah, Civil and Qatar hospitals for giving them to patients who underwent dengue treatment at the hospitals,” the EDO health said, adding that his department still had a good part of the 5,000 nets received from the federal government and hospitals, whether run by the city, provincial or the federal government, could acquire the nets for affected people, who needed more protection against the bites of Aedes egypti in order to avert health complications.

In the meantime, experts said that since the dengue fever was striking again in the city, there was a need to streamline the public health education strategies and creation of awareness among the masses about personal protection measures against the mosquito bites as well.

Dr Rafiq Khanani of the Infection Control Society of Pakistan stressed the need for training of doctors, both from the public and private sectors, in all towns of Karachi and other dengue vulnerable cities of the province, in dengue management. With an early response to the dengue epidemic and improved management of dengue, the number of deaths could be reduced significantly, he said.

A senior citizen said poverty, unplanned urbanisation, poor sanitation and deteriorating public health services had a lot to do with the mosquito-triggered epidemic of dengue in the city.