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WORLD

Rio officials fear dengue fever outbreak

Wednesday, January 18, 2006 Posted: 1816 GMT (0216 HKT)

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Brazil
Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters) -- An outbreak of dengue fever in Brazil's tourist mecca of Rio de Janeiro has prompted the authorities to step up prevention measures, fearing a repeat of a 2002 epidemic that killed more than 100 people, officials said Wednesday.

"We have flare-ups in two districts. It needs to be blocked urgently, because without such control we have a risk of having an epidemic again in Rio," Aloisio Ribeiro, head of Rio state government's Epidemiology Vigilance Center, told Reuters.

Dengue, or Aedes aegypti, is carried by mosquitoes and causes severe body pain, fever and headaches. Larvae breed in stagnant waters, in anywhere from abandoned swimming pools to flower pots and car tires left in the open air.

State and municipal authorities will launch a task force Thursday to combat the disease with vehicle-mounted insecticide sprayers and inspections of private homes and courtyards. Hundreds of workers will be sent to find and destroy larvae that breed in stagnant water.

One of the affected districts is upscale oceanside Barra da Tijuca. Barra and neighboring Jacarepagua accounted for more than 250 dengue cases out of 328 registered in Rio last month, and there were similar rates in January. December's total number of cases was three times higher than a year earlier.

Rio is preparing to receive hundreds of thousands of tourists for its famed annual Carnival in February.

Ribeiro complained that municipal authorities had relaxed their anti-dengue effort in the three years without major outbreaks and rejected their explanation that the disease had been brought from Brazil's northeast by poor slum dwellers.

"The problem is that there are plenty of mosquitoes, that Rio is an endemic area and there has not been enough effort to prevent dengue," he said, adding that the overall number of cases in the state was still around last year's levels.

Because the disease is common within the region, its residents are more likely to contract more than one of dengue's four strains, increasing the chance of a potentially deadly hemorrhagic form of the disease.

A total of 134 Brazilians died from that in 2002, with nearly 80 percent of the deaths in Rio state. Nearly 740,000 people contracted dengue across the country that year.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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