Dengue cases in the city have tremendously decreased four days after a citywide cleanup day carried out by different government agencies led by the City Health Office (CHO), NGOs and other private groups.

The Zamboanga City Medical Center had been receiving seven to 10 dengue patients a day, but after the September 2, 2010 anti-dengue campaign through a citywide clean-up drive, the hospital now only attends to 2 -3 patients a day, City Health Officer Rodel Agbulos said.

“The clean-up drive really helped a lot in the reduction of dengue cases in the city. But it should not end here. Continuous campaign in the household level must be strengthened in order to totally eradicate this killer disease,” Agbulos appealed in a radio interview yesterday morning.

Agbulos commended the different government agencies, private groups, fraternities and students of different schools and universities, personnel of the PNP and Task Force Zamboanga, barangay leaders and the constituents who took time out and shared part of their precious time in the clean-up drive last week.

Because of the high cases of dengue fever from January to August this year, the city government, through the office of the City Mayor, has issued an executive order declaring dengue outbreak in the city, thus, the need to come up with remedies to address the problem.

Based on the latest report, Barangay Guiwan has the highest number of dengue cases in terms of attack rate (number of cases against the population).

A medical team from Manila arrived in the city last week and conducted a surveillance right at Guiwan through an actual inspection of the breeding sites of dengue mosquitoes.

Abandoned containers with water were taken as samples and have been found out that 31 of the 33 containers were found to be positive as breeding sites of dengue mosquitoes otherwise known as “aedes aegypti”, the result revealed.

Because of this, CHO will focus its campaign in the eradication of dengue at Guiwan and some other barangays with high number of cases particularly in the month of August during which 314 cases have been recorded only for the first 20 days.