Dengue fever is sharply affecting the Central Highlands region and central Vietnam with the number of patients in the first eight months of this year in these areas rising sharply compared to those in the same period last year, health authorities reported. According to the latest report by the Health Ministry’s Preventive Health Department, the country had more than 1,700 new dengue fever patients in the past week, bringing the total number of people contracting the disease in the first eight months of this year to nearly 40,000. Compared with the same period of 2012, the number of patients nationwide decreased by 45.7 percent, but in 11 central provinces the total cases of dengue fever increased by 2.5 times and in the Central Highlands the total cases rose as many as seven times. The ministry has sent teams of experts to central provinces and the Central Highlands region to help local health authorities to combat the disease, especially in such provinces as Binh Dinh, Khanh Hoa, Quang Ngai and Quang Binh. According to Nguyen Van Binh, the department’s head, insecticide-resistant mosquitoes have recently appeared in many areas in those provinces, so higher contents of insecticide are required to be used in mosquito-spray. Therefore, the department will provide additional amount of mosquito-spray to Quang Binh and Binh Provinces where many hotbeds of the disease need to be suppressed as soon as possible, Binh said. Dengue fever is an infectious tropical disease that is transmitted by the bite of an Aedes mosquito infected with a dengue virus. The mosquito becomes infected when it bites a person with dengue virus in their blood. It cannot be spread directly from one person to another person. Symptoms include fever, headache, muscle and joint pains, and a characteristic skin rash that is similar to measles. In a small proportion of cases the disease develops into the life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever, resulting in bleeding, low levels of blood platelets and blood plasma leakage, or into dengue shock syndrome, where dangerously low blood pressure occurs.