Ishrat Jabeen¹, Avijit Sarker Jyoti^1,2, Rabia Akter Munni¹, Priya Dhar³, Sadia Tasnim⁴, Dibya Jyoti Paul⁵, Rahat Bin Yunus³, Tasnim Nuzhat Hussain⁶, Muhammad Taqee Bin Alam Zeem⁷, Sadia Alam Aivey⁸, Puja Paul⁹, Mazharul Islam Tusher¹⁰

¹Mugda Medical College Dhaka, Bangladesh

²Department of Public Health, University of South Asia, Dhaka, Bangladesh

³Magura Medical College, Bangladesh

⁴Cox's Bazar medical college, Bangladesh

⁵President Abdul Hamid Medical College, Kishoreganj, Bangladesh

⁶Habiganj Medical College, Bangladesh

⁷Dhaka Community Medical College Dhaka, Bangladesh

⁸Hiroshima University, Japan

⁹Chittagong Medical College, Bangladesh

¹⁰Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh

*Corresponding author:  Avijit Sarker Jyoti, Department of Public Health, University of South Asia, Dhaka, Bangladesh, ORCID: 0000-0001-7408-3855.

Citation: Ishrat Jabeen, Avijit Sarker Jyoti, Rabia Akter Munni, Priya Dhar, Sadia Tasnim, Dibya Jyoti Paul, Rahat Bin Yunus, Tasnim Nuzhat Hussain, Muhammad Taqee Bin Alam Zeem, Sadia Alam Aivey, Puja Paul, Mazharul Islam Tusher (2025) Epidemiological Investigation of Scabies Infestation in Dhaka Megacity, Bangladesh, 2024: Understanding the Severity along with it’s Associated Factors. Int J Fam Med Pub Health, 4(2);1-10.

Copyrights: © 2025, Avijit Sarker Jyoti, et al., This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Being a neglected tropical disease and a major public health concern, scabies is undoubtedly common and contagious specially for low socio-economic and densely populated areas like us. In spite of high burden, the epidemiology has not been well assessed specially for Dhaka, Bangladesh. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the epidemiological characteristics, severity along with it’s associated factors among the scabies infected individuals residing in Dhaka megacity, Bangladesh.

This cross-sectional observational study was conducted among 406 confirmed scabies infected individual residing in Dhaka city who attended the Dermatology and Venerology out-patient department of the selected hospital from May to November,2024 using the International Alliances for Clinical Scabies 2020 (IACS 2020) diagnostic tool.

Among the studied population, the highest percentage of scabies was observed as severe scabies (51%), then moderate (45.1%) and mild scabies (3.9%) respectively. The median age of the participants was 23 years having IQR 26 years, the median family income was 30,000 BDT with an IQR 10,000 BDT. Among moderate to severe scabies infected individuals 53.6% were male and majority (54%) were young adults. The highest reported occupation was garments work (28%). More than 90% participants belonged from moderate to high social status but 90 % of them practiced sharing of bedroom, bathroom and articles. Itching and positive contact history was present in 90% cases. Several factors such as: Low social status (OR:10.03 with 95% CI 3.35-30.14) was associated with higher severity of scabies and regular bathing (OR:0.31 with 95% CI 0.10-0.92), Presence of burrows (OR:0.02 with 95% CI 0.006-0.08), itching (OR:0.09 with 95% CI 0.03-0.34), positive contact history (OR :0.07 with 95% CI 0.03-0.23) were associated with reduced odds of having higher severity of scabies.

The higher severity of scabies in the study area accents the necessity to strengthen the preventive as well as control strategy of Bangladesh. Improvement of the socio-economic condition, better hygiene practice may help to mitigate the higher severity of scabies.

Keywords: Scabies Research Bangladesh 2024, Scabies epidemiology Dhaka, Scabies severity prevalence, Scabies severity factors.