Dengue outbreaks hit Medan and Indragiri Hilir regions

Apriadi Gunawan and Puji Santoso, The Jakarta Post, Medan/Pekanbaru

Fourteen people have died and dozens remain in hospital after dengue cases peaked in the Medan and Indragiri Hilir regions during the past two weeks, officials said.

The last fatality from the disease in Medan was Mardiati, 27, who died on Sunday after being treated in Sarah Hospital here.

Medan's dengue management chief, Syahrial Anas, said the families of the victims were in part responsible for the high rate of fatalities because they brought sufferers in too late.

Almost all the patients at the hospital had advanced symptoms of the fever, which made it more difficult for doctors to treat them and narrowed their chances of surviving, he said.

Cases of dengue fever first surfaced in the city in April this year and peaked this month, resulting in the deaths of six people, Syahrial said. A total of 59 patients are still being treated at hospitals in Medan and the disease has struck eight out of 23 districts in the city.

Syahrial, who is also the executive director of Pirngadi Hospital in Medan, said the government and his team had worked together to help contain the outbreak.

Hundreds of schools and residential houses have been fogged with insecticide to wipe out the larvae and eggs of aedes aegepty mosquito; the carrier of the deadly dengue virus.

Medan residents had also been encouraged to clean up their bathrooms and drains to kill the larvae and eggs, he said.

Two city councillors visited dengue patients in Pirngadi Hospital on Monday. One, Ikrimah Hamidi, slammed the central government for responding sluggishly to the outbreak.

"The government is not serious in its handling of this outbreak and there are now more and more patients being brought to hospitals for medical treatment," she said.

A parent of a dengue patient, Erlisada, 36, said his daughter had been treated for five days in Pirngadi Hospital. He was uncertain whether she would recover.

Dengue has also been spreading in the Indragiri Hilir area in Riau province for the past two weeks and eight people had died there from the virus, reports said. The outbreak first surfaced in the Kuala Selat subdistrict, some 250 kilometers east of Riau's capital Pekanbaru.

A team of doctors had been sent to the area to fight the disease, Riau provincial health office chief Ekmal Rusdy.

Officials both in Medan and Riau have expressed concern that the scale of the outbreak would equal the one earlier this year. Between January and February, the fever spread to 19 of the country's 32 provinces and killed almost 200 people.

The government has so far recorded 10,140 dengue cases this year with 195 deaths nationwide, mostly in Central Java, East Java and Jakarta.