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Field Study

Are our school children at risk? A field study on the number of students contracting dengue fever was carried out.

In order to compare the prevalence of dengue fever in urban and sub-urban area, a school from each of this locality is chosen for the study. Victoria Institution is located in Kuala Lumpur city while Bandar Baru Bangi Secondary School is located in sub-urban part of Selangor, a state in Malaysia. The respondents were limited to 200 students in Form Four from each school. The responses were collected and analysed.

Table 2 shows that students are not immune to dengue fever or dengue haemorrhagic fever. Further, there is an obvious 5-fold difference between the victims in urban area and sub-urban area. Of the 200-student sample, only 2% of students from sub-urban school have contracted dengue fever while 10% of them from urban school have suffered the disease.

Table 2. Data on students or their family members who contracted dengue fever and noticed fogging in housing area

The number of known cases among family members of students in urban school is also significantly higher. In fact the data shows that the frequency of occurrence is more than twice in that direction. Majority of the students noted that fogging had been carried out by government agencies in both rural and urban area.

On the susceptible age, of the total of 24 dengue cases, 3 of them contracted dengue fever at the tender age of 6 (Table 3). From the spread of distribution, we can conclude that our school children at all ages are at risk from dengue virus infection.

Table 3. Distribution of dengue cases by age

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