Public Health officials concerned about deadly dengue virus

Public Health officials at the airport are asking passengers if they had visited South East Asia in the previous ten days of their arrival in Seychelles. This is because in a number of countries of South East Asia a new but lethal dengue virus has been detected which has already caused the death of scores of people, especially children.

According to the newspaper, the Straits Times of Singapore, Dengue is becoming deadlier in the region with growing numbers of cases reported in at least two countries other than Singapore.

On June 28, Malaysia warned that dengue had reached ‘worrying levels’ while Cambodia appealed for urgent international help to fight what it described as an epidemic that has hit all its provinces and killed 138 children in the first six months this year. In Malaysia, the number of people suffering from dengue rose to more than 1,000 at the end of June.

In Cambodia, the disease has killed 138 of the 12,700 children diagnosed with dengue so far this year. In contrast, for the whole of last year, 116 of the country’s 12,300 young dengue victims died. Dr Lam Eng Hour, the deputy director of four Swiss-funded Cambodian hospitals, said his wards were bursting at the seams. Many children died of dengue, he said, because the hospitals were short of blood for transfusions.

The last time Malaysia recorded more than 1,000 dengue cases was for the week, ending May 19, when 1,033 people were diagnosed with the disease.

Dengue is not endemic to the Seychelles. It first arrived in 1978.