US: In Peru, hundreds of families weep as children are killed by dengue virus
By Ahmad Hadizat Omayoza, Mamos Nigeria
In a stream of white, mourners walked behind an ivory-colored, shoulder-borne coffin as neighbors, heads bowed and hands clasped, peered out of doorways on the narrow street in Castilla, a middle-class suburb in Piura, northern Peru. The death toll continues to rise in northern Piura as a result of torrential rain and floods that led to the worst ever epidemic.
Numerous girls carrying white balloons and roses waited for the cortege at the school gates in grey skirts and white shirts with red ties. Priscila Quispe, a classmate of theirs who was seven years old at the time, passed away from dengue fever last week in the public hospital in Santa Rosa.
As the students, staff, and parents stood in stunned silence, her teacher paid tribute to the bright, caring girl in the school courtyard.
One of Quispe’s victims was a dengue epidemic that was sweeping through Piura, the epicenter of Peru’s worst-ever epidemic of the mosquito-borne virus. Peru has 137,539 dengue cases and enlisted no less than 223 passings, the most elevated death rate for the infection in the Americas, as per information let on Saturday out of the Panamerican Health organization and Peru’s National center for
Epidemiology, Disease Prevention and Control.
At a cemetery in the Catacaos district of Piura, Peru, relatives and friends mourn Fer Maria Ancajima, a dengue victim who was 10 years old.
In spite of heavy rains and flooding in recent months, the half-million-person city of Piura has seen more than 40,000 cases and 69 deaths this year, including at least a dozen children.
In April and May, Tornado Yaku released heavy downpour on northern Peru, and the rising waters gave the ideal favorable places to Aedes aegypti mosquito, the vector for dengue, as well as chikungunya and zika, which is endemic in the hot northern locale, close to the line with Ecuador.
Lilian Pizarro, whose seven-year-old daughter Camila was recovering in an emergency tent hospital constructed on a sports field to accommodate the influx of dengue patients, stated, “The first day, [my daughter] had a high fever and abdominal pain, then on the second and third day she was vomiting and had diarrhoea.” The patients were cared for by medical professionals sent from Lima, the capital, behind mosquito nets.
The Guardian was informed by Dr. Jennifer Cuadros, a physician employed by the directorate for the prevention and control of metaxenic and zoonotic diseases, that despite having a plan in place for the event of a dengue outbreak, “the demand has been much greater than the supply.” After the most recent El Nio ripped through Peru’s coastal region, causing floods and landslides that killed over 140 people and damaged billions of pounds, the caseload was already double that of 2017.
The public hospitals in the city have been having a hard time keeping up, and beds are only available for the most serious cases.
At a hospital in Sullana, Piura, a patient with dengue fever walks among others who are resting under mosquito nets.
At a hospital in Sullana, Piura, a patient with dengue fever walks among others who are resting under mosquito nets. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images “Here we only take dengue patients with alarm signs – bleeding, persistent abdominal pain, and persistent vomiting,” said Dr. Ludwig Zeta, 26, who was manning triage at a maternity hospital alongside two nurses as dozens of patients waited outside. Numerous young adults and children reside here. Since the Covid pandemic, during which Peru had one of the highest mortality rates in the world, he hadn’t seen so many sick people.
César Orrego, the region’s ombudsman, stated, “In Piura, 30% of the infected are children.” We require pediatricians because their cases have a high potential for fatality.
On the edges of the city, many dengue victims must choose the option to remain at home. In a cottage produced using compressed wood and woven matting, Juana Aquino, 66, and her nine-year-old grandson, Abraham, were both rested up with fever. She has been his carer since her little girl and the kid’s dad were killed in a bike mishap quite a while back.
Another girl, Giovani Risco, was really focusing on both yet was reluctant to take them to the clinic, dreading they would be taken into escalated care.
In addition, neighbors were ill. According to their family, Josefa Rivas, 74, and Mario Moré, 76, had been confined to their beds for two weeks, unable to move or eat much.
Maria Galan, experiencing dengue, lies in her bed in the San Pablo neighborhood of Piura.
Maria Galan, experiencing dengue, lies in her bed in the San Pablo neighborhood of Piura. Photograph: Martín Mejía/AP
Cristobal Timaná, a local area pioneer, assessed that the greater part of the 640 families there had dengue. Six years ago, the community began as a camp for flood victims. Now, water is piped into barrels kept in homes by tanks. Because they are exposed, these serve as the mosquito larvae’s breeding grounds. Timaná claimed that he had pleaded with the local authorities for two months to fumigate their homes, but to no avail.
A mosquito that has been contaminated with a microscopic organisms to forestall it spreading dengue, Zika and chikungunya at a research facility in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Environment emergency ‘may seriously endanger 8bn of intestinal sickness and dengue’
An El Niño climate peculiarity expected in the not so distant future will bring all the more weighty downpour and flooding.
A 2022 study says that the climate crisis has increased the number of diseases spread by insects. Dengue fever is one of the consequences of the continuing rise in temperature, according to Dr. Luis Pampa, an infectiologist from Peru’s National Health Institute who was treating patients in the tent hospital.
“We don’t have to be fortune tellers to say that this problem could get worse if we don’t take it seriously,”
