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The Vietnam News

Year :      [2003]      [2002]      [2001]      [2000]      [1999]      [1998]      [1997]

Dengue fever hits Vietnam; 9,000 infected, 22 dead

More than 9,000 people have been infected with dengue fever in Vietnam in the first six months of this year, a 63 percent rise over the same period in 2002, state media said on Saturday. Twenty-two people among the 9,300 struck down with the disease died, the Tuoi Tre newspaper said, citing a health ministry report.

The worst affected provinces were in the southern Mekong Delta region, where moist and humid conditions provide ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes. The region accounted for more than 92 percent of cases, according the ministry's report. Large outbreaks of the virus, which first appeared in Vietnam in 1969, tend to occur every four or five years, according to health experts.

Some 383 people died in the last such epidemic in 1998, which infected 234,866 people across the country, according to the World Health Organization. Characterised by painful joints, fever and a rash, the debilitating symptoms of dengue usually begin within a week of a carrier mosquito's bite and last for seven days.

But it also comes in a more deadly haemorrhagic form, usually on second infection with another of the four types of dengue virus.

Agence France Presse - July 19, 2003.