February brought Dhaka's worst recorded month of air quality since the country's air monitoring network was modernised in 2018, and paediatricians in three of the capital's busiest catchments say they are seeing the bill in their outpatient queues. Across nine private and public hospitals tracked by BHRF, nebulisation visits among children under five rose 22 percent year-on-year in the first quarter.
"We are seeing children with no history of asthma turning up with wheezing that lasts for a week. We are seeing five-year-olds on inhaled corticosteroids," said Dr. Tasneem Reza, a senior paediatric pulmonologist at Square Hospital. "There is a generation growing up in Dhaka whose baseline lung function is being shaped by what they are breathing right now."
The Department of Environment's monitoring stations recorded a monthly mean PM2.5 of 168 µg/m³ in February, almost 34 times the World Health Organization's annual guideline. The contributing sources are well documented — brick kilns, diesel, and re-suspended road dust — but enforcement against any of them has been intermittent.
Civil-society groups, including the Bangladesh Paediatric Association, have called for a winter brick-kiln moratorium near schools and for a reactivation of the high-AQI school-closure protocol that was briefly used in 2023. The Department of Environment has so far declined to comment on either proposal.
BHRF will be publishing a long-form interactive next month showing how PM2.5 readings near 24 Dhaka primary schools tracked alongside paediatric outpatient volumes through the winter.
