Communicable Disease - Dengue Fever

BACKGROUND

Communicable disease is a disease that spread from one person to another person through many variety of ways that include contact with blood or being bitten by an insect (Communicable disease, Alameda Country Public Health Department). Contaminated surfaces such as playground equipment, door, the equipment that may touch by anyone, may provide a medium of passing the disease from one person to another person although they may not know how they get the disease. There are five of the main infectious disease such as dengue fever, tuberculosis, food poisoning, hand foot and mouth disease and HIV/AIDS.

For example, dengue fever is one of the communicable disease. Dengue fever is cause by the spread by the mosquitoes that thrive in and the human lodgings. When an infected mosquito bites a person the virus will be enters into the person’s bloodstream. The risk of developing severe dengue fever, will increases if the infected person infect second, third or a fourth time (Dengue Fever diseases and conditions, Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research).

Statistics of Dengue Fever in Malaysia [pic 1]

There is big different about the places that reported dengue fever around Malaysia. We get a chart of“The cases and deaths of  dengue fever reported in different state in 2013” from MyHEALTH Kementerian Kesihataan Malaysia.

From the chart above,  we can see the highest number of cases reported is in Selangor, there is up to 23,852 cases. It is higher 19,024 cases than the second highest number of cases, Johor. Selangor has a scary incidence rate of 457/100,000 population, that means in 1,000 persons in Selangor that will be 4.57 persons get into dengue fever before. But against to Johor, that is just 143.3/100,000 populations. Although that is a huge difference of cases reported but the deaths occur in these 2 states is the same.

Furthermore, that is 14 cases reported in Wilayah Persekutuan Labuan. The lowest number of cases reported and the lowest incidence rate in whole Malaysia. The second lowest number of dengue fever cases reported is Perlis, with a slightly higher 212 cases. But we can see a significant difference of incidence rate in this 2 states, that is 77.3 / 100,000 population difference.

News of Dengue Fever in Malaysia

There is a news about one-third decrease in dengue deaths written by Loh Foon Fong published on 6 January 2017 in The Star Enews.

The news had reported that the number of cases that reported in 2016 had slightly decrease by 19,476 cases compare to 2015, but unfortunately our neighbour country like Singapore, Laos and Vietnam had increased.

Besides that, the total number of deaths in dengue fever is a little bit drop from 336 deaths in 2015 to 237 deaths in 2016.

And our ministry target to reduce dengue fever every 5 % annually.

Choice of segment

Among the various types of communicable diseases in Malaysia, we decided to choose dengue fever as our main segment for review. There are few reasons for our choice. First of all, it is due to the consequences to the patient. For instance, dengue fever can be fatal. According to our statistics in year 2015 there are 336 cases of death reported due to dengue fever. Although it may not seem much, however these cases should have been able to be avoided. This is because the public does not give enough concern that dengue can be very dangerous and fatal. Dengue fever becomes more dangerous because those infected may have no idea about it and try to wait for it recover like regular fever, this could worsen their situation and put their lives at risk. Therefore we wanted to do this review on dengue to further increase awareness of dengue fever and how dangerous it can be. Up to this moment, there is still no cure yet from the dengue virus. The only way to recover is though our own natural immune system. Therefore, it is important that we should be cautious of it.