Vigilance urged for disease outbreaks during Lunar New Year

The warning was made by Truong Dinh Bac, deputy head of the Preventive Medicine Department, at a meeting with the press on disease prevention during the festivals.

According to Bac, in the last months of 2015 and the first month of 2016, dangerous and newly-emerging diseases like MERS-CoV, avian flu A(H7N9), and Zika fever continued to be recorded in several regions of the world, and the risk is real that those diseases may enter Vietnam.

Therefore, local preventive medical centres have been instructed to promptly build, approve and implement disease prevention plans right from the beginning of this year. 

They were urged to coordinate closely with medical clinics to learn about the symptoms of infectious disease, and to share information on disease developments, in order to detect early signs in patients hospitalised during the lunar New Year holidays and festival season, to prevent outbreaks. 

Localities were asked to carry out sweeping measures to contain diseases, strengthen inspections at border gates, be ready to quickly detect and handle newly-arising outbreaks, and be prepared with all necessary medicine, equipment and forces to prevent diseases spreading. 

The official reported that outbreaks of bird flu continue to happen, mainly caused by A(H5N1) and A(H5N6) viruses, but all of them have been contained promptly. No transmission of those viruses to human has been reported since early 2015.