Dengue fever rises in central Vietnam

Southern Binh Dinh Province General Hospital's paediatrics faculty was designed to hold 100 sick beds however the current number of patients was up to 300, with one third dengue-fever cases.

The situation had placed pressure on the local health sector. A working delegation including doctors from the Pasteur Nha Trang Institute, HCM City's Paediatrics Hospital 2, and Quy Nhon City-based Institute of Malariology, Parasitology and Etomology came to the province's grass-roots health centres to inspect dengue prevention measures on December 6-7.

Nha Trang Pasteur Institute director, Vien Quang Mai said the main cause of dengue cases becoming serious was the appearance of all four types of the dengue virus. There was a seven-fold increase of type D2 dengue-fever cases compared to the last epidemic.

Paediatrics Hospital 2 experts said Binh Dinh General Hospital's dengue treatment was following Health Ministry protocols.

Binh Dinh Province's Health Department reported a total of 2,726 cases of dengue fever in the province last year, including five fatalities.

Among these fatalities, four were children.

Le Quang Hung, the department's deputy director said it was significant that most serious dengue-fever cases recently didn't show typical symptoms of the dengue virus.

So it was difficult for doctors to correctly diagnose the fever, he said. In many child dengue fever cases, parents gave antipyretic medicine to their children at home, and only brought them to hospitals when they were in a serious condition.

Five fatalities were serious dengue-fever cases that went into shock and showed signs of cardiac arrest.

The current weather is favourable for the transmission of the disease by mosquito, so the number of dengue fever cases is increasing, according to the deputy director. Treatment was becoming more and more difficult.

Meanwhile, in the southern Khanh Hoa Province, doctor Nguyen Dong, director of the province's Hospital of Tropical Diseases said it had received 2,500 dengue cases since last October.

He said the increase of dengue patients was due to the three-year epidemic cycle, hot weather in the south, and environmental pollution in cramped residential quarters.

The provincial Health Department reported more than 9,400 dengue cases requiring hospitalisation in 2015, an increase of 10 times against 2014.

It also led to overcrowding at local hospitals, the department said.