MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

First 2009 (mild) dengue case reported in Paraguay

Paraguayan health officials confirmed the first case of dengue fever here so far this year and announced a health blockade along the border with Argentina after the deaths of two men from yellow fever in the neighbouring country.

The head of the health monitoring department from the Health Ministry, Ivan Allende, said that a 45-year-old woman in a middle-class Asuncion neighbourhood is recovering satisfactorily from a case of classic dengue, which is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. Allende said that the woman was one of the 2,317 suspected cases of dengue reported by the Health Ministry in 2008, which ended with 16 people actually falling ill with the disease, albeit the benign form and not the often fatal hemorrhagic dengue. He added that in the first week of January, four suspected cases of dengue had been reported, an illness that in 2007 took 17 lives among the 27,000 people infected. "Since October (2008), we've been actively monitoring. It's the risky period due to the conjunction of the high temperatures with the rains and the movement of people on (winter) vacation," he said. On related issues Allende said that health monitoring activities have been substantially increased against the risk of an outbreak of yellow fever after Paraguayan health authorities were notified by their counterparts in Argentina of the deaths of monkeys in Corrientes province, on the border with Brazil and Paraguay. "The province of Misiones (which borders with the southern Paraguayan province of Itapua) reported three cases of yellow fever, with two deaths," said the doctor, who added that in the southern part of the country immunization procedures against that disease had resumed. In the first quarter of 2008, yellow fever, which is transmitted by a jungle variety of the A. aegypti mosquito, caused the deaths of eight people in Paraguay. Several neighbouring countries and France contributed with vaccine donations. Dengue and yellow fever, at low scale, are considered endemic along the jungle are of the three borders (Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay).-