THREE UNIQUE INITIATIVES OF KMC FOR DENGUE PREVENTION IN KOLKATA CITY, INDIA, DURING 2014
Abstract
Author(s): Debashis Biswas, Tarun Safui, Subrata Maulik, Basudeb Mukherjee, Bithika Mandal, Baishakhi Biswas and Atanu Banerjee.
Information regarding travel-associated dengue in Kolkata City is abysmally lacking. By strengthening its intra-departmental disease surveillance system, the health department of Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has for the first time succeeded in studying the issue. During January to August 2014, identifying 183 laboratory-diagnosed indigenous cases of dengue apart, the KMC people came across 15 residents of the city who contracted the disease after they had returned from travel to different dengue-endemic areas outside the city. One of them had visited Sri Lanka and one Thailand. The rest 13 citizens brought in the dengue infection from places around India. Preventing import of travel-associated dengue is just not feasible in the present era of globalisation, when one can easily move from one place to another in a jiffy. In view of this, the health department of Kolkata Municipal Corporation has given a top priority on controlling the population of the dengue-bearing mosquito Aedes aegypti. Keywords: Aedes aegypti, Kolkata, travel-associated dengue, 3-tier monitoring, data-bank
