Checks for monsoon diseases
Minister of Public Health Mongkol na Songkhla has ordered provincial health officials and hospitals nationwide to closely monitor patients for nine life-threatening diseases that are more likely to occur during the upcoming rainy season.
The heightened alert starts this month and will last for three months, Mongkol said yesterday. The nine diseases include bird flu, influenza, lung inflammation and dengue fever. Mongkol said he had also ordered health officials and about 800,000 health volunteers nationwide to keep track of poultry deaths in their villages. There were no new human victims of bird flu in Thailand during the first five months of this year, he said. Disease Control Department director-general Thawat Suntrajarn said his agency had warned the public about the diseases because they usually recur during the rainy season. Thawat said that last month there were 21,919 patients with one of the nine diseases and six of them had died - four from lung inflammation and two from acute diarrhoea.
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