As winter commences and temperature drops, people start experiencing a cold weather coupled with foggy atmosphere especially in the northwest region of the country.
So, the number of patients especially children and elderly people with cold-related diseases has increased across the country recently. Various cold-related diseases like common cold, influenza, bronchiolitis, pneumonia, tonsillitis, sore throat, asthma, earache, whooping cough and viral diarrhoea are infecting the people mostly children and elderly ones.
Many of them were admitted to their respective districts health complexes and general hospitals in the last three days, according to media report. But, the seasonality of influenza activity has raised a new public health concern in addition to dengue.
The flu tends to be associated with more body aches and fatigue than a cold and symptoms of the common cold include fevers, coughing and sneezing. Patients with viral fever and cough have also been thronging hospitals and clinics since a week. If a member of the family has fever, other members are also getting infected and falling sick.
Make people
conscious about
cold-related diseases and
provide treatment properly
All the patients, who are visiting the hospitals and clinics, are suffering from various seasonal diseases like fever, cough and throat pain.
Read More: Dengue death toll crosses 900
Therefore, it is difficult for the patients to know whether they are infected with common flu caused by winter or dengue without test. The death toll from dengue infection crossed the 1300-mark as the authorities recorded 1,333 dengue deaths between January 1 and October 29 this year.
Physicians advise people not to get panicked, requesting them to go to hospitals and clinics to have test and diagnasis of diseases. With the advent of winter, we must all remain cautious about cold-related disease.
Therefore, people have no reason to be panicked but must follow the physicians and experts’ health guidelines to protect them. Apart from the cold weather, the dust pollution also causes serious diseases including heart, chronic respiratory diseases, lung infections and even cancer during the winter.
So, the health ministry should issue instructions to its concerned departments, government hospitals, health complexes and all other organisations at the field-level to make people conscious about cold-related diseases and provide treatment properly. Districts and upazila administration should distribute warm clothes among the distressed to mitigate their sufferings in advance.