Residents told to help cut aedes life cycle

JAKARTA (JP): Officials called on city residents on Tuesday to actively participate in preventing the dengue hemorrhagic fever outbreak by cutting the life cycle of the aedes aegypty mosquito.

"This is the responsibility of all of us," Governor Sutiyoso told reporters at City Hall.

He said the city administration had allocated a special budget of Rp 1.3 billion (US$173,000) to overcome the recent dengue fever outbreak.

Separately interviewed, head of the city's Health Agency Achmad Harjadi said it was not difficult to prevent the dengue fever outbreak as all efforts started at household level.

"It's important to remind city residents that the mosquitoes prefer places with clean and still water to lay their eggs. Residents should cover water containers and periodically clean or bury them," he told reporters.

"All these activities don't cost a single penny. Residents can do it during their daily household activities," he said.

He emphasized that residents should not let any open water containers remain uncovered or uncleaned.

"The mosquito can lay its eggs even on a small bottle cap," he said.

Achmad said it was important to cut the mosquito's life cycle to prevent the outbreak.

"Cutting the mosquito's life cycle means preventing the mosquito, which has sucked virus-infected blood from a dengue fever patient, from transferring the virus to healthy people," he said.

"Once we've cut the cycle, we can make sure that there will be no more dengue fever," he said, while adding that there was still a long period of time needed to cut the cycle.

He said the success was also related to the residents' habits, besides that of environmental health.

"Neighboring Singapore, for example, has succeeded in cutting the mosquito's life cycle because everyone there uses showers when they bathe. In Indonesia, we aren't accustomed to using showers yet," he said.

Using showers, he said, could at least minimize the number of containers of clear and still water, if compared with using water containers as most Indonesians still do.

Bird lovers should pay more attention to periodically replacing containers of drinking water for their birds, he added.

Achmad admitted that the outbreak had reached an alarming level.

"All these activities really depend on the residents themselves. We don't need expensive projects to prevent dengue fever," he said.

Achmad said the state of the outbreak was declared because the number of people infected with dengue fever over the past two months was more than doubled that of the same period last year.

"There have been 1,293 cases over the past two months with six fatalities, compared to 3,751 cases during all of last year with 45 fatalities," he said. (nvn)