Hanoi and the fight with dengue fever

On Aug 12, Hanoi launched a large-scale environmental sanitation campaign across all localities to kill mosquitoes and mosquito larvae, while strengthening the spraying of chemicals and facilitating propaganda work against the spread of dengue fever in the capital city. The campaign will be maintained regularly until September 4.

Vice Chairman of Hanoi People's Committee Ngo Van Quy inspects the work of dengue fever prevention in Ha Dong District

Currently, dengue fever has spreaded rapidly across the city during the last 3 months, with an increased number of infections over the same period in 2016 and seven deaths have been recorded.
Inspecting the work of environmental sanitation and dengue fever prevention in Quang Trung ward, Ha Dong district, Vice Chairman of Hanoi People's Committee Ngo Van Quy acknowledged that dengue fever control measures have been taken seriously.

He proposes 5 measures to tackle the outbreak

Local people have joined together with the functional forces to clean the environment, clear bushes and cover water tanks to avoid mosquito reproduction. Propaganda work on dengue fever prevention has been strengthened to cover each household, while the spraying of mosquito killing chemicals has been deployed on a large scale.
To spray effectively, the city is implementing a focused spraying, with concentration on several districts with a large numbers of dengue fever infections. Especially during the peak period of the epidemic, in September, the city will focus on deploying environmental sanitation work and larval killing in all districts.
Until August 17, the city will strive to finish the larva killing campaign in all districts, before deploying two other campaigns in the coming days, while intensifying inspections and applying sanctioning measures against units and individuals that fail to perform environmental sanitation and dengue fever prevention.
Conducting an inspection at Ha Dong General Hospital, Deputy Chairman Quy listed out 5 measures to tackle the outbreak in the District, including: Enhance propaganda to every single resident, office in the region; clean the habitat at every Saturday in which focus on infrastructure, project area, market, school; review the outcome after cleansing phase 1 ends; move on the phase 2 and phase 3 of killing mosquito ; reshape the outbreak  zone to concentrate the solution.  
He also requested that the hospital prepare sufficient facilities, medicine and staff to meet the treatment requirements, as well as actively preventing dengue fever through sanitation activities.
"At the same time, Hanoi Department of Health should create favourable conditions for local hospitals in supplementing equipment, especially testing devices, to quickly return test results to patients and ensure adequate funding for dengue fever prevention", Quy said.
Ha Dong district ranks fifth in the highest number of patients detected with dengue fever in Hanoi. Since the beginning of the year, the district has had 938 infections and 171 outbreaks. Currently, only 96 cases are being treated in local hospitals, the remaining patients have been cured, with no fatalities.
To prevent a widespread outbreak, Ha Dong has deployed a range of preventive measures, focusing on promoting propaganda work to each household and mobilising the relevant forces to kill larvae.
The district hosts 1,134 larvae-killing mobile teams and hundreds of surveillance missions. The district has mobilised social resources to intensify spraying machines and provide instructions on how to properly spray the chemicals, as well as inspecting epidemic prevention, organising environmental sanitation and spraying mosquito-killing chemicals on a large scale, especially in high risk areas.
According to the Head of Hanoi’s Health Department Nguyen Khac Hien, together with the organisation of inspection teams for dengue fever prevention, the department will also check the classification of patients in hospitals: severely ill patients will be treated in hospitals, while patients with minor illness will be transferred to local clinics in order to avoid overloading at hospitals that could cause difficulties in monitoring the source of infection.
In previous years, on average, there were only 5,000-6,000 dengue fever cases in Hanoi each year; in 2009 alone the number of infections increased to 16,000 with four deaths and almost 15,500 in 2015. This year, despite not reaching the peak period yet, the number of infections has reached nearly 13,000, with seven deaths.