Santosh catches dengue fever
Our second year medical student Santosh has returned from a placement in a rural community in Makawanpur District called Ramanthali. He was only there for 1 week but found it extremely informative and he is now an expert on measuring blood pressure and malnutrition. After his return he contracted dengue fever which is a viral infection spread by mosquitoes and is very prevalent in Nepal. The infection is usually mild and passes after about 1 week without causing any lasting problems. But in rare cases it can be very serious and potentially life threatening. We are very proud of you Santosh and pleased to hear that you are now fully recovered from dengue fever. Here’s Santosh’s report in his own words:
“We have been posted to rural community of Makawanpur district, called Ramanthali for 1 week. During our week we stayed in the local community’s houses. The main aim of this posting is to know about the awareness and prevalence of dengue fever which is epidemic there now. Also the main important purpose of this posting is to do community diagnosis ( Blood pressure measurement, malnutrition check). Our group consisted of 6 members we have to do census of each house, collect all the demographic data, measure blood pressure of age more than 15 yrs and malnutrition measure of children of less than 5 years. We also try to make people more aware of dengue fever. We visited the individual households, looked for water storage, saw the larva of dengue mosquito, we make people aware about how to prevent contracting dengue fever. We measured the blood pressure of many individuals, and we noted that lots of people are in prehypertensive, and we told people how to avoid it.
We also measured the malnutrition of children under 5, we found all of the children to be well nourished. We also provided information about immunization and its importance for children. I am now perfect in measuring blood pressure and malnutrition! We lived in the community, our host families helped us to do our work and we got to know about community diagnosis which is very fruitful for us in clinical practice. I found this posting to be very interesting.” Santosh