As the Control Yuan reprimanded health departments for the worst outbreak of dengue fever in Kaohsiung in the past 14 years, a US dengue expert said yesterday that the spread of the disease was not entirely the government's fault.
"The control of the epidemic chiefly depends on the cooperation between the government and every household," said Duane Gubler, an official from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Gubler's remarks came at a press conference held by Taiwan's CDC to introduce the contents of the weeklong APEC workshop on surveillance of the dengue virus, which begins on Monday.
Gubler, director of the US CDC's Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Disease, said the most effective way to prevent dengue fever is to control the mosquito population.
"The population in the Kaohsiung region is about 3 million. Suppose every household in the area has three or four people, then there would be nearly 1 million households in Kaohsiung," Gulber said.
Gulber stressed that the key approach to control the mosquito population is to eliminate mosquito larvae rather than adult mosquitoes.
"However, to wipe out mosquito larvae, each household would be required to empty their water containers on their own," Gulber said, adding it is beyond the government's capacity to clean water bottles for every household.
According to Gulber, the natural tendency of the response of cities where the epidemic erupts is to spray pesticide to kill mosquitoes.
But Gulber said the method is not really effective.
Dengue experts from eight countries in the Asia Pacific region attended the APEC workshop directed by Gulber and a Taiwan-born US CDC official, Chang Gwong-jen (
Experts from Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand are also attending the event.
"The reason we chose Taiwan as the country to host the workshop is because it has an excellent dengue prevention system; one of the best in the region," Gulber said.
According to Gulber, the major goal of the workshop is to establish good dengue surveillance systems for countries in the Asia Pacific region.
"If you can have a surveillance system that can give early warnings of the disease or predict it, you can prevent it," Gulber said.
Gulber noted countries in the region need to share dengue surveillance data so that prevention measures are effective.
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