Dengue fever most affected age group 5-24

Dengue Type 2 is the dengue

fever virus that is currently affecting the people of Port Vila and nearly the whole country after the outbreak was first announced in the second week of November 2016.

Manager of Malaria and Vector-borne Diseases unit of the Department of Health, Esau Nakat, confirmed this to Radio Vanuatu in her program on health.

He said this dengue type virus is back in the country 20 years after it last ravaged the country in the 1980s and caused some deaths.

Now there are over a thousand cases reported throughout the country with over 600 confirmed but no deaths have occurred, he added.

The reasons Nakat gave for this were: “This means people are hearing the message about keeping safe from the disease and are responding and many of those older people who caught the dengue type 2 virus before have developed antibodies against the disease.”

He added that this explained why the most affected age category recorded this time is 5 to 24.

Nakat explained that when the outbreak was first announced the dengue virus was concentrated in Port Vila and the unit tried insecticide spray to contain the virus. But when the virus started to spread to the rural areas outside of Port Vila such as Etas, Eton and Mele, they abandoned the idea and moved to working with the communities to destroy the breeding places of the mosquitoes as a containment measure.

In three months after the outbreak was first announced the dengue virus has spread to nearly all the provinces with Tanna reporting over 100 confirmed cases while in Port Vila 39 people were reported hospitalized. The first case reported from Penama Province is being verified, Nakat added.

Dengue is spread by several species of mosquito of the Aedes type, principally A. aegypti. Dengue fever virus (DENV) is an RNA virus of the family Flaviviridae; genus Flavivirus.

There are four types of Dengue virus — Type 1, Type 2, Type 3 and Type 4. In 2014, the Type 3 dengue virus ravaged Vanuatu.