Dengue in Malaysia Essay -- Health, Diseases

Dengue has now emerged as one of the major public health problems in Malaysia. It was first reported in 1901 in Penang and since then the disease has become endemic concentrating mostly in urban areas. The objectives of this study were to utilize the temporal role-spatial model to determine elevated risk areas for the breakbone fever outbreak. This study examined a total of 25000 confirmed breakbone fever fever cases, geo-coded by address in the urban center of Subang Jaya between Jan 2006 and December 2009, were included in the study. The results were worn-out from a measurement of the three temporal risk characteristics (Frequency, duration and intensity) in order to determine the severity and magnitude of outbreak transmission.The time values of the three indices were considered high in a spatial whole when their standard values were positive. Measurement of the three temporal risk indices found that there were areas with significant high value for each of the temporal indice s. This suggested that areas within Subang Jaya Municipality had different temporal characteristics for dengue occurrence. The utilization of three risk measures enabled to identify higher-risk areas for the occurrence of dengue fever, concentrated in the citys northern region. The correlation coefficient for all the three types of relationship was above 0.7. The value indicated that there was a strong correlation between each temporal risk indices. Even though case notification data are subject to bias, this information is available in the health services and can ingest to important conclusions, recommendations and hypotheses. As a recommendation, the temporal risk indices can be utilized by public health officials to characterize dengue rather than relying on the traditional case incidence data.... ...rrupted cases. This index gives an idea of the persistence of transmission and represents the average duration, in weeks, of epidemic waves that occurred in the given period.Intens ity index (), characterized as the mean incidence of cumulative dengue cases occurring in consecutive weeks per epidemic wave that had persisted for more than two week. It can be expressed as = TI / OEwhere TI is the incidence rate during the given period and OE is described above. It assesses the severity of transmission, and is based on sequences of weeks with the occurrence of uninterrupted cases. High values mean time-concentrated transmission.The dengue cases were provided by MPSJ where dengue cases were summarized according to the housing area, on a weekly basis. Therefore, this study used a week as a temporal unit for better comparison on different indices.