Two children infected with dengue fever virus are treated at Ho Chi Minh City’s Nhi Dong 1 Hospital

Vietnam is verifying an outbreak in Hanoi of a mosquito-borne virus that closely resembles the dengue fever virus, a health ministry official said on Monday.

At this stage it seems they have contracted the lookalike Chikungunya virus, which is carried by the Aedes albopictus mosquito.

They have caught some Aedes albopictus mosquitoes in Hanoi and are trying to determine whether they are responsible and whether they really do have an outbreak of Chikungunya, Nam said.

It’s recurred in regional countries like India, Thailand and Singapore, and some deaths have been recorded in consequence, according to Nam.

Nam said it was hard to tell the two diseases apart without testing as the symptoms were virtually identical.

The World Health Organization is helping out by supplying Vietnam with 50 testing kits for the Chikungunya virus.

The kits have already been distributed to the northern Pasteur Institutes and Institutes of Hygiene and Epidemiology for testing people who present with dengue-like symptoms at local cities and big towns.

Since the beginning of this year, 6,750 people in Hanoi have been admitted to hospital with dengue symptoms, 14 times more than in the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Health.

This week alone has brought 519 new cases in the national capital, nearly twice the 270 recorded in Ho Chi Minh City, which was always among the worst-affected places in previous years.

Asked about the capital’s soaring tally, Nam said it could be partly attributed to the fact that around 5 percent of Hanoians have antibodies against dengue fever as their city has incurred several mild outbreaks of the disease.

It’s also likely that the population of dengue-carrying mosquitoes is growing, he said.

Nam voiced his displeasure with the city for failing to take routine precautions against the disease, and said that many health workers were ignorant of the danger lurking in such mosquito larvae “nests” as water buckets in private homes.

Also on Monday, the health ministry ordered its agencies to complete their experiments on an influenza A (H1N1) vaccine and produce the first 10,000 doses by next June for clinical trials.

The ministry anticipates starting public inoculations with the home-grown vaccine next autumn.

In the meantime, Vietnam will receive the first batches of foreign-made vaccine against swine flu next month under WHO’s program for developing countries,

Since it emerged here in May, swine flu has sickened over 10,200 people and killed two dozen, according to the ministry’s latest statistics.

The number of new recorded cases per day is dropping now that health clinics are following the ministry-ordered practice of automatically prescribing the antiviral drug Tamiflu for anyone with flu symptoms instead of testing them.

Source: Thanh Nien, Tuoi Tre