Dengue cases are set to soar this year, with the first week of the year already showing a worrying spike.
The Health Ministry had recently warned that the dengue outbreak could become worse — a 50 per cent increase in the average number of cases — from the El Nino effect that’s set to stay until March.
Public hospitals are bracing themselves for this, Health director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah told The Star Online.
“We are optimising our resources to cater to the predicted increase in dengue cases,” the portal quoted him as saying following its report on Tuesday which revealed that there were 1,000 extra cases of dengue recorded in the first week of January compared to the corresponding period last year.
According to Hisham, public hospital are prepared to deal with the volume of patients but at the same time, he said, not all patients require hospitalisation.
