In south China's Guangdong Province the number of dengue
cases has risen by 36 since Tuesday to 124, said the provincial
health bureau on Thursday.
Thirty-eight new patients were reported over the past two days
but two earlier cases had been excluded, according to the bureau.
Initially thirty-six new cases were reported in the provincial
capital of Guangzhou and one each in the cities of Foshan and
Yangjiang.
Sixty-three patients have recovered and the others were reported
to be stable in hospital. Five cases involved people from
Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia and Thailand and the rest were local
people, said the bureau.
Dengue is a serious infectious disease transmitted by
mosquitoes. It kills 25,000 people and infects more than 100
million each year in tropical and subtropical regions worldwide,
according to China's Ministry of Health.
Since the 1990s, dengue has broken out occasionally in Guangdong
and neighboring Fujian Province but only on a small scale.
However, significant outbreaks occurred in Fujian in 1999 and in
east Zhejiang Province in 2004.
The local health bureau has called on residents to clean up
their local environments to eradicate mosquitoes, as there are no
effective vaccines to prevent the spread of the disease.
The ministry has announced a nationwide monitoring of dengue to
gather details of epidemic conditions and analyze spread patterns
so the disease can be detected rapidly and treated. Sixteen
monitoring sites will be set up in the southern provinces of
Guangdong, Fujian, Yunnan, Hainan and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
(Xinhua News Agency September 1, 2006)