The National Environment Agency (NEA) recently said that over 13,000 dengue cases have been reported so far this year. This is a cause for alarm since we have just reached the time of year, June, when the traditional peak dengue season starts.
“NEA urges all individuals and premises owners to take urgent action to break disease transmission,” the agency said on its website, outlining helpful steps to take, including removing stagnant water and potential mosquito breeding habitats.
The unusually high number of dengue cases has experts concerned—not just for Singapore, but for the rest of the world, CNN said in a recent report.
Changes in the climate around the world point to disease outbreaks of this type becoming more common, as well as more widespread, in the future.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Desmond Tan was quoted on CNN as saying that dengue cases have “definitely” risen faster.
He also called the situation “an urgent emergency phase now that we have to deal with.”
What has spurred the outbreak is the extreme weather—hotter and wetter days—Singapore has recently experienced.
In a worldwide dengue report, the World Health Organization (WHO) said last January that dengue is “now endemic in more than 100 countries” and that the number of cases has risen “30 fold in the last 50 years.”
“Not only is the number of cases increasing as the disease spreads to new areas but explosive outbreaks are occurring,” the report added.
Previous to this year, Singapore saw its worst outbreak two years ago, when 35,315 people came down with dengue and 28 died.
A spokesperson from the Ministry of Health told CNN that as of the end of May, there were 11,670 dengue cases recorded.
Around ten per cent of those who had fallen ill needed hospitalization, they added.
So far, hospitals have still been able to handle the number of dengue patients, but the season has just begun.
“Some individuals may develop severe dengue that can result in death,” the MOH spokesperson said to CNN, adding, “We remind the medical community of the appropriate clinical management of dengue cases and to maintain a high level of clinical suspicion when seeing patients with fever.”
Duke-NUS Medical School senior research fellow Ruklanthi de Alwis noted the dominant new virus strain as one of the causes of the surge in cases.
However, she admitted that climate change is likely to escalate matters.
She told CNN that “Past predictive modeling studies have shown that global warming due to climate change will eventually expand the geographical areas (in which mosquitoes thrive) as well as the length of dengue transmission seasons.”
Singapore Management University climate scientist Winston Chow said, ”We will not be able to eradicate dengue (because) the constant weather extremes create the perfect breeding conditions for mosquitoes.
Changing environmental conditions are magnifying mosquito breeding rates, so unless the climate emergency improves, it will become even more difficult to eliminate the risk of dengue fever altogether.
And it will be a painful battle for Singapore in the long run,” he added. /TISG