Dengue outbreaks hit Medan and Indragiri Hilir regions

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.