With increasing temperature, summer, the peak season of dysentery, comes.
Dysentery is one of the most popular and frequently-occurred intestinal infectious diseases in Beijing. April to October comes the peak season of every year. Normally it reaches the peak in August and September. Statistics show that the incidence of dysentery continues to stand at the first position among Category B infectious diseases in Beijing, despite a descending dysentery incidence of Beijing in recent years. In 2008, Beijing reported a total of 24,823 cases of dysentery disease, with an incidence accounting for 48.56% in Category A and B infectious diseases. Thus, dysentery remains to be one of the major infectious diseases that seriously endanger the health of the residents.
Dysentery is an intestinal infectious disease caused by shigella. The main symptom of dysentery is diarrhea. The clinical symptoms occur in fever, bellyache, diarrhea, tenesumus and blood-like stool. Toxic bacillary dysentery can go along with symptoms of high fever, infective shock, hydrocephalus and respiratory failure and even to endanger life when it is on an acute bout.
There are four routes of transmission of dysentery. The first one is food-based spread. Having unclean raw/cold food, melon or fruits may causes dysentery.
The second one is waster-based spread. If the dejection of dysentery patients and bacteria carriers is not disposed in a proper way, which causes pollution of water source, or if contaminated natural water, well water, tap water are drunk without disinfection, dysentery will usually outbreak.
The third one is contact-based spread in daily life. The transmission goes mainly through your dirty hands when touching items like desk, chair, toy, doorknob, bus handrails. In this case, you may be infected by shigella. When your hands contact these contaminants and then go to fetch food at once, or when children have the habit of sucking their fingers, bacteria will find their way in by the mouth to cause diseases.
The fourth one is food contamination caused by flies.
As the proverb goes “illness finds its way in by the mouth”. Particularly, intestinal infectious diseases such as dysentery are transmitted through the fecal-oral route. Therefore, creating a good sanitary environment is the best way to prevent dysentery. There are several ways to prevent dysentery, including washing hands before meals and after using the bathroom, washing out raw fruits and vegetables, no drinking of unboiled water, eating less raw cold food, paying attention to the environmental and personal hygiene, eliminating pests that can transmit the dysentery, such as flies.
Many citizens are reluctant to go to hospital when they have loose bowels. They would rather take some antibiotics. Abuse of antibiotics may lead to bacteria resistance. We hereby remind the public of never abuse of antibiotics on diarrhea, please go to hospital as soon as possible if you have loose bowels and take the medicine as directed by your doctor.
Beijing Municipal Health Bureau has requested all the 335 intestinal clinical departments in Beijing to start treating patients since April 1, following the principle of Examining Every Diarrhea Case and Reporting Every Epidemic Disease Case. Meanwhile, the management authorities shall make efforts to carry out health education to help the public raise the awareness of intestinal infectious diseases, to intensify health monitoring on the food & beverage industry, so as to ensure good prevention and control of intestinal infectious diseases such as dysentery.