Govt prepares team to combat dengue fever

Eva C. Komandjaja, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The government plans to dispatch over 70,000 field workers to 10,000 villages nationwide to help eradicate dengue fever and increase people's awareness of sanitation, an official said.

The Secretary of the Directorate General of Communicable Diseases at the Ministry of Health, Syafii Ahmad, told The Jakarta Post the ministry had proposed the initiative last year but lacked the necessary funding to carry it out.

"Currently, the ministry is waiting for state funds to enable this program to work," Syafii said.

The program would cost over Rp 1 trillion (US$119 million) and would deal with other communicable diseases along with dengue fever, he said.

It would involve about 70,000 graduates from nursing academies, who would help locals eradicate communicable diseases and provide education and treatment.

A similar program was launched by the government in the 1950s to contain malaria. A team called the Malaria Extermination Command was formed in 1959 and managed to curb malaria cases in Indonesia to 0.16 per 1,000 people by 1969, far below the epidemic ratio of 1 per 1,000 people.

Syafii said it would be difficult to eliminate dengue fever completely because no vaccines had been developed to provide immunity against the virus.

"Without vaccines, we can only kill the carrier -- a mosquito -- and clean up the environment," he said.

Health ministry spokeswoman Mariani Reksoprodjo said the ministry would eradicate dengue fever in line with the Indonesia Healthy 2010 blueprint.

As of Friday afternoon, the number of patients infected with dengue nationwide has reached 17,289 with 312 deaths. Most cases have been found in Jakarta, but Central Java recorded the highest casualty rate.

Syafii said dengue fever cases could go down if the public participated in the nationwide fight against the disease, which included eliminating the Aedes Aegypti mosquito and its larvae.

In her televised speech on Thursday, President Megawati Soekarnoputri called for public involvement in the national campaign and promised assistance to patients.

The dengue outbreak could last until April, when the dry season came, Syafii said.

However, Yogyakarta Health Agency head Choirul Anwar said cases could continue to rise after the season. If puddles of water formed after the rains were not drained or fumigated, the number of dengue-carrying mosquito larvae would increase.

Mariani put off the announcement on whether the dengue virus was a new form, saying the results of ministry's study would be made public in the next three to four weeks, up to a month later the original date of Feb. 25.

"We took about 500 samples from the Jakarta area. Therefore, it will take quite a long time to finish the serotype tests," Mariani said.