Doctors warn of serious dengue outbreak

by Shanika Sriyananda

The epidemiologists warning of a serious outbreak of dengue fever as people pay more attention to Chikungunya fever, which is not as deadly as dengue fever said that the laboratory results on Chikungunya fever are due next week.

Though the symptoms and sources of infection are similar, unlike dengue, Chikungunya fever is not deadly but the patients will end up with artharitis.

Consultant Epidemiologist Dr. Ananda Amarasinghe told the 'Sunday Observer' that public responsibility is vital to prevent spreading of both fevers and called upon them to pay more attention to the symptoms of the killer dengue fever.

With the floods, over 2,000 fever cases have been reported from Colombo, Mannar, Kalmunai and Jaffna areas. With the increasing number of Chikungunya fever cases reported in South India, Sri Lankan health authorities have taken steps to send blood samples of patients with high fever to local and foreign laboratories to check for Chikungunya fever.

Dr. Amarasinghe of the Epidemiology Unit of the Ministry of Health said that these blood samples had been sent to five laboratories - Medical Research Institute, Kelaniya University, Gene Tech and two foreign laboratories in India and Thailand.

"The final laboratory results on Chikungunya fever will be out next week and until then we cannot say the number of patients or the presence of this fever in the country", he said.

The blood samples of these patients are from all parts of the country which recorded high incidences of viral fever.

According to Dr. Amarasinghe, the country lacks laboratory facilities for Chikungunya fever but the MRI conducts laboratory tests for other mosquito borne diseases including the dengue virus.

He said that the best defence against the deadly mosquito borne diseases was cleaning of the environments regularly to destroy the mosquito breeding grounds.

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