Dengue claimed 27 lives and more than 44,000 people tested positive for the disease in Bengal this year, chief minister Mamata Banerjee said in the Assembly on Tuesday.

Junior health minister Chandrima Bhattacharya said in the House that Calcutta was one of the dengue-prone areas.

Mamata, who is also health minister, said her government was doing everything possible to contain the spread of dengue but the weather was conducive to an outbreak.

The dengue virus is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which breeds in clean, stagnant water. The ambient temperature has to be 16 degrees Celsius or more for the Aedes mosquito to breed.

The chief minister blamed poor infrastructure of some nursing homes and late arrival of dengue patients at hospitals and nursing homes for the deaths.

She said the death count — 27 out of the 44,852 dengue cases reported so far this year — showed the government’s efforts had helped many people recover from the disease.

“Each and every death is unfortunate. But we have also been able to save the lives of a lot of people,” Mamata said on in the House.

“People are taking patients to nursing homes that do not have adequate infrastructure. By the time the patients are being shifted to hospitals that have proper infrastructure, many have reached the organ failure stage.”

She hinted that abandoned plots owned by the Calcutta Port Trust, railways and the airport, and the construction sites of new Metro lines in Calcutta — all these departments are under the Centre — were mosquito breeding sites.

The chief minister was speaking during a short discussion on dengue, which was started by education minister Partha Chatterjee. The Left and Congress MLAs, some of whom took part in the discussion, had walked out when the chief minister rose to speak.

Speaking before her boss, junior health minister Bhattacharya pointed out that Calcutta, North 24-Parganas, Nadia, Alipurduar, Howrah and Hooghly were among the dengue-prone areas.

An official in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) said 4,500 dengue cases had been reported in the area under the civic body since January. Seven of them died.

“The budget for dengue prevention is Rs 475 crore in 2019-20,” Bhattacharya said. Last year’s budget, the chief minister later said, was Rs 245 crore.

CPM MLA Asok Bhattacharya in his address said the government was not handling the problem of “vector-borne disease” with the seriousness it deserved.

“The nature of dengue is changing each year. Is the government focusing enough on research? Is the government making special outlays?” asked Bhattacharya.

Another death

A health worker of the CMC who used to visit houses to make people aware about dengue and its preventive measures died of the disease on Tuesday. Tangra resident Santana Bandopadhyay, in his 40s, worked in Ward 58.