Nearly all Chennaities have been affected by dengue, says study
Posted on: 18/Jul/2015 11:37:36 AM
A study by the John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health has said that a large number of people in the Southern state of India are susceptible to mosquito borne diseases, especially dengue and chikangunya. The study has said that measures to control the diseases must be taken.
Researchers tested blood from 1010 people in Chennai alone. The people came from across 50 locations across the city. The results showed that nearly all the people had been exposed to dengue and that 44 per cent had been exposed to chikangunya.
According to one of the researchers, ‘People are just not aware of the disease... (We) asked participants if they had ever been ill with dengue and only one percent of them said yes, when in fact 93 percent had been infected by it... (We estimate) that on average, 23 percent of those who have not yet been infected become infected by dengue every year, corresponding to roughly 228,000 infections per year in Chennai alone... The rate of infection was extremely high, almost three times higher than in areas of Brazil and Thailand where transmission was thought to be high.’
