July 24, 2019

To understand the current dengue outbreak, Associate Professor Alex Cook, Vice Dean (Research), revisits the situation in the years following Singapore’s independence and explains how the virus was limited in its transmission in the next few decades. Fifty years ago, it was limited by number of people to infect, as most people had already been infected and were immune to the virus. As the country developed one of the world’s best vector control programmes, transmission was limited by availability of both people and mosquitoes to infect. Over the years, itRead more

Singapore is seeing one of the worst dengue seasons in several years, with more cases so far this year than the last two years combined. Assistant Professor Vincent Pang, Director, Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research (CIDER), attributed the rise of dengue clusters in certain areas to three factors: 1) greater clustering of households within a residential area, 2) low cluster herd immunity, and 3) high frequency of residents travelling to dengue-endemic countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. He added that areas with a greater number