Davao del Norte capital under state of calamity over dengue outbreak

DAVAO CITY—Tagum City, the provincial capital of Davao del Norte, has been placed under a state of calamity following the outbreak of dengue cases, which peaked in September this year.

While incidents of the mosquito-borne disease tapered this month, its number continued to be beyond the alert level set by the Department of Health (DOH), the City Epidemiology Surveillance Unit (Cesu) reported.

Dengue cases in the city shot up to a total of 1,074 cases from January to November this year, already more than a fourfold of the 251 cases monitored for the entire year of last year, the Cesu said.“The Department of Health required the city to declare an outbreak when the number of cases already goes beyond the threshold level,” said Mayor Rey Uy in a phone interview on Tuesday. He added: “We are sounding the alarm so that the public will be better informed and be prepared to deal with dengue. Most of all, they would be more careful and would work [toward] preventing it.”

The state of calamity declaration passed by the city council on Nov. 21 would pave the way for the release of funds to finance the city’s efforts to destroy mosquito-breeding grounds and curb the rising cases of dengue in the city.

Cesu also recorded nine dengue deaths in the first 11 months of the year, most of them teenagers and one as young as 3 years old. Uy clarified, though, that the dengue deaths happened in the different months of the year and in different villages of the city.

Uy attributed the high cases of dengue in affected areas to their high population density and the onset of heavy rains that must have left pools of stagnant water that could have easily become the breeding ground for mosquitoes.

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Rae Katherine Apura, city health education promotion officer, said on Tuesday that of the more than a thousand dengue cases, 623 or 58 percent involved children from 0 to 9 years old.

She said the dengue cases peaked at 194 cases in the month of September, or more than double the 80 cases alert level set by the DOH. It went down to 140 cases in October to less than 100 cases this November but there was no let up in the City Health Office’s information drive to mobilize the public in the fight against dengue, Apura said.