Students wearing masks during a lesson at the Babussalam Islamic boarding school in Malang, East Java.
Health officials announced a swine flu outbreak there late last month.
The nation’s preoccupation with swine flu is overshadowing the far more deadly dengue fever, which has killed nearly 600 people so far this year, the health minister said on Wednesday. “The number of people who have died of dengue fever is far higher than the people who died from H1N1 influenza,” Siti Fadillah Supari said, after signing an agreement between the Health Ministry and telecommunications giant PT Telkomsel to promote dengue awareness. Only three Indonesians and a total of 65 people in Southeast Asia have died from the H1N1 virus as of Tuesday, according to the World Health Organization. Tjandra Yoga Aditama, the ministry’s director general of communicable diseases, said that from January through July there were 585 deaths in Indonesia from dengue out of 77,000 cases. He said that while the death toll had decreased from the same period last year, when 734 out of 91,000 infected people died, dengue remained a serious threat. Supari said it was almost impossible to eradicate the virus because the nation’s tropical climate provided an ideal breeding ground for dengue-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. “There is no vaccine,” she said. “The best we can do is prevent it from infecting our families.” Tika Bisono, a prominent psychologist and ambassador for Peluk Asa (Embracing Hope), an anti-dengue program, said poor hygiene also hampered the country’s fight against the disease. “We stop at being worried,” she said. “We don’t actually do anything and we ignore the small things, like keeping our neighborhoods clean.” Tika, who lost her 10-year-old daughter to dengue in 2007, said most people realized the virus was deadly but would not take preventive measures. “Every minute, a child somewhere in the world dies due to dengue fever.” Nonetheless, Supari said the country had reduced dengue fatalities. In 2004, she said, the proportion of cases that resulted in death was 2.1 percent, but in 2008 it was only 0.8 percent. “I remember in 2004, when we had an extraordinary [outbreak] of dengue fever, the hospitals were overwhelmed and more than a thousand people died,” she said. “But [today] there has been a significant decrease in both the prevalence and fatalities.” Supari also said timely treatment was key to preventing mortality, adding: “Don’t be afraid to seek help at the hospital immediately. It is free of charge for those who cannot afford it.”
