MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Dengue kills 6 in Argentina

Between 80 and 90 cases of dengue are treated daily at one single Buenos Aires hospital and the number of infections is growing

Health authorities in the Argentine province of Tucumán Tuesday reported three more deaths due to dengue, which after last week's casualties, brings the total number of fatalities to six nationwide.

Tucumán's Health Ministry confirmed in a press release the death of two adults diagnosed with dengue, one of them with comorbidities, in addition to the first fatality reported in the province last Thursday. The other cases were in Salta (2) and one in Santa Fe.

Official data on the outbreak of dengue at the national level from August 2022 to March 2023 show a 95% nationwide increase in the number of cases in just one week.

The National Health Ministry said 9,388 people had been reported with the infection, of whom 8,504 were infected domestically since nearly 90% of the cases have no travel history.

In the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), the number of cases has grown rapidly. Doctor Federico Charabora, director of the Santojanni public Hospital told local media the facility was treating between 80 and 90 cases of dengue daily, with three of them needing hospitalization.

“Three weeks ago we saw that they began to grow from 10 or 20 cases to double until we reached the numbers we have now, which are 80 to 90 patients a day,” Charabora was quoted as saying.

Dengue is only transmitted through the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito. It is not transmitted from person to person, nor through objects or breast milk. The same is true for the Chikungunya and Yellow Fever viruses. Zika, on the other hand, can also be transmitted sexually or from mother to child during pregnancy.

Dengue is considered by the World Health Organization (WHO) to be one of the 20 neglected tropical diseases (also known by the acronym “NTDs”), which have been even more neglected during the Covid-19 pandemic.