Hsieh fights against contenders, dengue

Kaohsiung City Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) probably never thought that dengue fever would become a serious issue in his reelection campaign.

Kaohsiung officially reported the year's first confirmed case in June.

Even now, officials in Hsieh's camp do not think the disease will be a major issue in the campaign.

"The situation is not that bad. At present, less than 10 cases on average are reported from 463 boroughs of the city every week," Lin Yun-chien (林永堅), deputy mayor and secretary-general of Hsieh's camp, told the Taipei Times Saturday.

Lin's account, however, conflicts with Cabinet health and environmental officials' assessment of dengue in Kaohsiung.

The outbreak, the most serious in Taiwan in 14 years, is expected by health authorities weeks ago to renew the historical record in November.

According to government statistics, 4,389 Taiwanese people contracted dengue fever in 1988.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, as of Friday, 4,358 confirmed cases, including 2,234 in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan's second-largest city, have been reported.

Meanwhile, there have been 118 confirmed cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever, resulting in 13 confirmed deaths.

Dengue fever broke out in Taiwan island-wide in 1915, 1931, and 1942. The infection did not reappear until the early 80s. Symptoms of the infection, which is seldom deadly, are similar to a severe case of influenza, but dengue hemorrhagic fever is a potentially fatal complication.

This year, 98 percent of confirmed cases are from three jurisdictions in southern Taiwan. In Kaohsiung's adjacent jurisdictions, Kaohsiung County and Pingtung County, 1,799 cases and 217 cases have been reported respectively as of Friday.

To assess the disease's progress, acting head of the Department of Health (DOH), Twu Shiing-jer (涂醒哲), inspected southern Taiwan Thursday.

Twu said that the situation in Kaohsiung County was under control, while that in Kaohsiung City and Pingtung County remained troublesome.

Lin told the Taipei Times that the city government had tried its best to fight the disease by adopting strategies, including dispersing insecticides to kill mosquito larvae, publicly promoting efforts to wipe out breeding sites for mosquitoes, disinfecting empty buildings and unoccupied apartments and distributing thousands of endemic Macropodus opercularis (蓋斑鬥魚) -- also known as the Paradise fish -- to residents.

According to recent government-sponsored researches, the fish preys on mosquito larvae more effectively than other fish.

Early in October, Taipei County Commissioner Su Chen-chang (蘇貞昌), Hsieh's party comrade, donated thousands of the fish to help Hsieh fight the mosquito population. Unfortunately, all the fish were poisoned only days after it was raised in a pool in downtown Kaohsiung.

In one of Hsieh's new books, The Sun Rises in the South (日出南方), the frustrated mayor wrote that the death of the fish was politically motivated, implying that the last thing his opponents wanted to see was for him to succeed in controlling the disease.

As for the disease, Hsieh attributed its spread to several factors, including higher temperatures last winter, heavy rains this year, the health department's slow confirmation process when dealing with suspected cases and the public's lack of knowledge about the disease.

Hsieh, however, said in his book that he should be responsible for the mosquito's resistance to the pesticides that the city uses.