This is also the time when plenty of diseases develop and more likely to burst out, notably contagious diseases.
The Ministry of Health issued its warning at the meeting on prevention of winter-spring diseases yesterday in Hanoi.
Common spring epidemics involve acute respiratory illnesses, measles, viral infections, Japanese encephalitis, chicken pox, meningitis and dengue fever.
According to the Ministry , though the number of contagious disease cases has declined as of November, 2019 compared to the same period last year, it is highly likely that diseases from alien countries enter Vietnam.
Deputy Head of the Preventive Medicine Department Dang Quang Tan pointed out dengue is leading with 250,000 patients including 49 deaths, a year on year increase of 300 percent.
Moreover, there have been more than 43,000 hand-foot-mouth cases increasing by 4.2 percent with the deaths while the country reported over 6,500 cases of measles.
Many cases of seasonal influenza such as H3N1 and H1N1 have been recorded countrywide without cases of H5N1 and H7N9. Additionally, scattered cases of encephalitis, diarrhea, whooping cough, and diphtheria have been observed in the country.
Health Minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien said because diseases have developed complicatedly locally and internationally, flu and measles are the most worrying diseases.
To prevent outbreaks of winter-spring diseases, Ms. Tien said grass-root medical clinics should carry out preventative measures against diseases that frequently occur in the first three months of the year during the humid weather as well as taking heed to role of local administration and unions in supervising fresh outbreaks.
