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  • Essay / Dengue in Malaysia - 1599

    Dengue has now become 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 mainly in urban areas. The objectives of this study were to use the spatio-temporal model to determine areas at high risk of dengue epidemics. This study examined a total of 25,000 confirmed dengue cases geocoded by address in Subang Jaya City between January 2006 and December 2009, and were included in the study. The results were derived from a measurement of the three temporal characteristics of risk (frequency, duration and intensity) to determine the severity and extent of epidemic transmission. The values ​​of the three indices were considered high in a spatial unit when their standard values ​​were positive. Measuring the three temporal risk indices revealed that there were areas with a significantly high value for each of the temporal indices. This suggests that areas in Subang Jaya Municipality had different temporal characteristics in dengue outbreak. The use of three risk measures made it possible to identify areas at highest risk of dengue outbreak, concentrated in the northern region of the city. The correlation coefficient for all three types of relationships was greater than 0.7. The value indicated that there was a strong correlation between each temporal risk index. Although case reporting data are subject to bias, this information is available in health services and can lead to important conclusions, recommendations and hypotheses. As a recommendation, temporal risk indices can be used by public health officials to characterize dengue fever rather than relying on traditional case incidence data...... middle of paper . ..... interrupted cases. This index gives an idea of ​​the persistence of transmission and represents the average duration, in weeks, of epidemic waves occurring during the given period. • The intensity index (γ), characterized as the average incidence of cases cumulative dengue fever occurring during consecutive weeks in an epidemic wave that persisted for more than two weeks. It can be expressed as follows: γ = TI / OE where 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 appearance of uninterrupted cases. High values ​​mean concentrated transmission over time. Dengue cases were provided by the MPSJ, where dengue cases were summarized based on residential area, on a weekly basis. Therefore, this study used week as the temporal unit for better comparison on different indices..