The number of hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) and dengue fever cases is rapidly increasing in Ho Chi Minh City, threatening to assume epidemic proportions, a local official said Tuesday.
Addressing a meeting on epidemic prevention, Nguyen Dac Tho, vice director of the Ho Chi Minh City Preventive Health Center, said 950 cases of HFMD have been recorded this month, 147 more than last month.
Overall, the city’s hospitals have admitted nearly 5,000 patients with the disease since the beginning of the year, and six people have died, he said.
Meanwhile, the Children's Hospital 1 and 2 have recorded 50 cases of dengue fever on average per day over the past two weeks, and 1,120 cases have been reported so far this month.
Tho said the course taken by the diseases was becoming "unusual" with intervention measures are not conducted frequently and tending to be applied “subjectively.”
Also at the meeting, the city’s Department of Health announced that it is launching measures to curb the epidemics. It plans to restrict the number of hospitalized cases of HFMD to less than 250 per week, and dengue fever to less than 300 cases a week over the next three months.
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