Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Singapore Says It Expects More Zika Cases

Video
bars
0:00/0:47
-0:00

transcript

Zika Spreads in Singapore

After Singapore's health ministry said on Tuesday that it had confirmed 82 cases of Zika infections, local residents and medical professionals weighed in on the risks of the virus.

(SOUNDBITE) (English) 18-YEAR-OLD SINGAPORE RESIDENT, NG KAI YEE, SAYING: think it’s pretty alarming and I think steps should be taken to actually find out how or why the sudden spread of the Zika virus occurred.” 1. SOUNDBITE (English) Dr Lim Chien Chuan, Sims Drive Medical Clinic: “Well, I’m not too worried about the cases that have presented because they are mainly very mild. They presented with very mild fever and a rash and (INAUDIBLE), so what alerted me was the fact that we are seeing some increased cases over the last two weeks before we informed the MOH (Ministry of Health) on the 22nd of August, so it was after repeated tests to exclude dengue and other viruses that we decided that we want to seek the assistance of MOH

Video player loading
After Singapore's health ministry said on Tuesday that it had confirmed 82 cases of Zika infections, local residents and medical professionals weighed in on the risks of the virus.CreditCredit...Wong Kwai Chow/The Straits Times, via European Pressphoto Agency

SINGAPORE — Singapore, which has confirmed several dozen cases of the Zika virus in recent days, expects to identify more previously undiagnosed infections as it steps up measures to halt the spread of the mosquito-borne disease, according to the government.

The city-state’s Health Ministry said on Tuesday that it had confirmed 82 Zika cases, up from 56 the previous day. “The Ministry of Health will continue to work with general practitioners in the area to offer testing for patients who had fever and rash previously,” the ministry said in a statement. “The look-back exercise will likely uncover more previously undiagnosed cases of Zika.”

At least 36 of the people known to have been infected were foreign workers at a construction site in eastern Singapore, the ministry said. It said the government had inspected about 5,000 premises in the city-state’s east, including the construction site, for mosquito breeding habitats.

The World Health Organization has declared an international emergency over Zika, which has been linked to microcephaly, a birth defect in which babies are born with brain damage and abnormally small heads. The virus has spread explosively in Latin American and the Caribbean.

Other Southeast Asian countries besides Singapore have reported Zika cases recently, including Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. Some experts believe that the virus has circulated at low levels in tropical regions of Asia for decades. Starting in the 1950s, clusters of cases were detected from Indonesia to Pakistan. But large outbreaks were not detected, partly because routine Zika tests were never developed for public health laboratories, and because Zika resembles mild cases of other mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and chikungunya.

Ooi Eng Eong, a professor and deputy director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, said Tuesday that it was not surprising that the virus was in Singapore, since it is spread by the same mosquito that carries dengue, which is a recurrent problem here.

“In the same way that dengue still spreads in Singapore despite dengue control, I will expect more instances of Zika,” Professor Ooi said. “Especially when data shows very few of us have the immunity against it, compared to dengue.”

Singapore confirmed its first locally transmitted Zika case on Saturday, after a 47-year-old Malaysian woman tested positive. Just one day later, the government reported that 41 Zika cases had been confirmed.

Opposition politicians, pointing to that sudden increase, questioned whether the government had been upfront with the public about the spread of Zika here. The Workers’ Party, the only elected opposition party with representatives in Singapore’s Parliament, called on Sunday for the government to clarify its timeline for public notification of such cases, and the Singapore Democratic Party said on its website that officials must “stop giving excuses and give Singaporeans timely and complete information.”

On Sunday, Chee Hong Tat, the minister for both health and information, denied that there had been any attempt to conceal the outbreak. “This is certainly not true,” he wrote on Facebook, adding that the government had been “proactive in engaging the different stakeholders to identify possible cases, conducting screening and testing to identify the confirmed cases, and promptly announcing such cases to the public once they have been confirmed.”

Last year, an outbreak of hepatitis C that affected 25 patients at Singapore General Hospital was not made public for months, raising questions about the government’s transparency in reporting threats to public health. Eight of the people had died, though the local news media attributed only seven of the deaths to the virus.

The Zika outbreak has also stirred painful memories here of the 2003 epidemic of sudden acute respiratory syndrome, SARS, , which led to 33 deaths in Singapore.

“I really hope this Zika hoo-ha is contained soon,” said Low Chee Beng, 38, a self-employed Singaporean. “I don’t want to return to the SARS days when we had to worry about even leaving our home.”

A correction was made on 
Aug. 31, 2016

An earlier version of a capsule summary with this article misstated the day on which the government confirmed 82 Zika cases in Singapore. It was Tuesday, not Monday.

How we handle corrections

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT