Understanding Dengue Fever

Vectors are living organisms capable of transmitting infectious disease between humans or from animals to humans. In most cases vectors are bloodsucking insects in which the disease causing microorganism are ingested during a blood meal. Mosquitoes are the commonly known disease vectors. Other vectors include ticks, flies, sandflies, bugs and freshwater aquatic snails. In Queensland, there has been a report on an outbreak of dengue fever at a time when there is an increase in number of tourists and families are preparing for Christmas. Dengue fever is a vector borne disease caused mosquitoes. It has been estimated that close to 390 million dengue infections are reported annually with more than 100 million resulting in serious illnesses (Mayer, Freeman & Baird, 2017).

Dengue fever is transmitted through a bite of an Aedes mosquito infected with a dengue virus. Its major symptoms usually begin six days after infection and may last up to ten days. Symptoms include; high fever, severe headaches, pain behind the eyes, severe joint pains, muscle pain, nausea, vomiting, skin rash and mild bleeding from the nose and gums. In some cases, the symptoms may be mild hence being mistaken for a flu or a viral infection. People who have never been affected tend to show milder cases. The mildness of the symptoms vary in children and adults. An infection of dengue can result in severe problems such as dengue hemorrhagic fever, complications resulting in high fever, damages to the lymph and blood vessels, severe bleeding from the nose and gums, enlargement of the liver and circulatory failure(Mayer, Freeman & Baird, 2017). People who are risk of dengue fever are the ones having a weak immune system since it may lead to dengue hemorrhagic fever.

Diagnosis of dengue fever can be done by a professional doctor where blood tests are conducted to check for the presence of the virus or any foreign substance. There is no specific treatment of dengue fever. If an individual suspect to be having the fever, it is an advisable to take pain relievers with acetaminophen and avoid the intake of aspirin as it may increase bleeding. Increased symptoms should lead to seeing a medical doctor. Prevention of dengue fever will involve preventing people from being infected by reducing the population of mosquitoes through destroying their habitats such as cutting down tall grasses and sealing stagnant pool of water with the environment. Most importantly, there are different ways in which people can protect themselves (Mayer, Freeman & Baird, 2017). These ways include; use of mosquito repellant both for indoor and outdoor, when outside, people should be advised to wear long sleeved shirts, windows should be closed and there should be increased use of air conditioners. This will help people to protect themselves against the vector borne disease.

Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatment of Dengue Fever

Emergency Management Australia- this is a government agency in charge of emergency management and coordination. This agency will help in planning, structuring and arrangement through involving the private agencies and a coordinated efforts in dealing with an emergency response (McPherson, Hill, Kama & Reid, 2018). The resources that they will use include government, community and partnered private institutions.

Local hospitals-these hospitals will provide trained personnel and medical facilities that will be used to help contain the outbreak within a confined area (Samsuddin, Takim, Nawawi & Alwee, 2018). Additionally, the local hospitals will provide nurses who will help in taking care of patients once undergone a treatment session with a physician at a camp.

Local authorities such as the police or local government- these are the people who will provide law and order in that, they will help in spreading the message on how to prevent further outbreak of dengue fever (Ryan et al., 2018). Additionally, they can help in providing resources such as vehicles to transport medical equipment to hospitals or camps where the patients infected with dengue fever will be isolated. Other resources that they can provide will be monetary assistance to help pay for the services of the volunteers and running the whole program until the outbreak is contained and precautionary measures taken.

Local media outlets-These people will help in the spread of messages on how to control the disease such as doing away with stagnant pools of water and other appropriate methods to reduce the population of mosquitoes within the region.

Human resource-The human resource will include the doctors, nurses and response team. The doctors will be administering treatment, the nurses will be taking care of the patients who will be having acute symptoms of dengue fever.

Outbreak Prevention Website: This is a website which will be used for delivering information. In this website there will be educational resources and training programs towards handling the disaster and preventing the disaster.

World Health Organization/Local disease control centers and CDC: These organizations will be providing research facilities and pieces of equipment which will be used to contain the disease. Additionally, they will also function as informants to the public about the existing health situation.

Poor communication-when there is poor communication between the affected regions and the response team, it will be difficult to determine the exact location unless the victims are traced to the next nearby location (Lee, 2018). Additionally, poor communication among the response team members may lead to mismanagement of resources due to lack of coordination. Minimizing the impact of dengue fever will be determined by the type of communication that exist among the key stakeholders in regards to containing the vector borne disease.

Key Stakeholders in Disease Control

Poor planning-Planning is a key element in a disaster response. When there is poor planning, it will be difficult for the response team to carry out a coordinated response to the affected areas. Poor planning will also lead to numerous mistakes being made from the top management down to employees or team members (Samsuddin, Takim, Nawawi & Alwee, 2018). This will limit the success of controlling the disease. This is something the local government will not tolerate and other key stakeholders.

Inadequate personnel-personnel play a key role towards containing the disease. Without skilled personnel it will be difficult for the disease to be contained. This means that, a large number of population will be affected. The response team should have adequate personnel who will help to ensure that all affected people receive adequate medical care without further hesitation (Sadhukhan, Banerjee, Das & Sangaiah, 2018).

The first step will involve the organization recognizing signs of the stressors in both the affected and the response teams. Some of the signs include; difficulty in communicating thoughts, difficulty in sleeping, limited attention period, poor work performance, disorientation and confusion, depression and overwhelming guilt. The next step will involve contacting faith based organizations, voluntary agencies or professional counselors to offer guidance for the affected population. This will happening six days after a response has been established. Additionally, as the patients recover, families will be contacted to confirm the safety of their loved ones. The following are ways in which the organization will ease stress for the affected individuals; affected people will be advised to talk freely about their feelings, seek help from counsellors, use of existing support groups to provide emotional strength and increase hope (Oloruntoba, Sridharan & Davison, 2018). For the response teams, they will be advised to spend time with their families, take steps towards promoting their emotional healing and maintain a normal family routine.

The Infectious Diseases Branch at Queensland Health should create an enabling legislative framework focusing on disaster risk management. This will require creation of policies which will be used. Additionally, the organization should form a partnership with relevant organization capable of providing resources that will be used to run a disaster in case of any problem within the region (Shafique & Warren, 2018). The legislative policies enacted by the institution should involve all the stakeholders to ensure that they are aware of the roles that they will be playing and know the legislation to be followed (Itzwerth, Moa & MacIntyre, 2018)

Avoiding Poor Communication, Inadequate Personnel and Poor Planning

Secondly, there should be increased capacity building for disaster responders or professional at all levels. This is aimed at strengthening the abilities and capacities of any partnering organization (West, Casella & Grimes, 2017). In the organization, all response teams should be provided with adequate training on how to handle a disaster. They will be also trained on how to handle work-related stress during the disaster response. This will make them stay focused without getting emotionally affected with the suffering of the affected people during and after the disaster. Capacity building will also involve testing the readiness of the organization to handle an outbreak of any disease or health disaster that may lead to catastrophic effects within the region. Stakeholders should be involved in training the response teams and other personnel who are involved in managing the disaster (Parkinson et al., 2018). The training is a period where there will be a practical practice of the lesson learnt with an objective of evaluating the effectiveness of the disaster management plan for Dengue fever outbreak.

Thirdly, there should be increased access to information and data. The main reason for this is for the establishment of an effective disaster communication network with an objective of providing speedy information and decision making during the disaster (Smith & Lawrence, 2018). This will be a collective effort involving the stakeholders. This will also involve a hotline which will be given to the public to respond in case a person shows any symptoms of dengue fever. The hotline will be tested and its response time determined. Additionally, the response team will be timed on their ability to respond once a call has be made to a designated location. Another possible outcome is determining the financial readiness of the organization to deal with such as disaster (Warnken & Mosadeghi, 2018). This will require seeking for external intervention from either the government.

References

Itzwerth, R., Moa, A., & MacIntyre, C. R. (2018). Australia’s influenza pandemic preparedness plans: an analysis. Journal of public health policy, 39(1), 111-124.

Lee, J. B. (2018). Natural disaster and emergency information management research in Australia. In 18th International Conference Road Safety on Five Continents (RS5C 2018), Jeju Island, South Korea, May 16-18, 2018. Statens väg-och transportforskningsinstitut.

Mayer, J.K., Freeman, K., & Baird, R.W. (2017).Introduction of a rapid diagnostic dengue NS1 antigen-IgM/iGg combination assay associated with a reduced inpatient length of staY.Pathology, 49(3), 329-330.

McPherson, A., Hill, P. S., Kama, M., & Reid, S. (2018). Exploring governance for a One Health collaboration for leptospirosis prevention and control in Fiji: Stakeholder perceptions, evidence, and processes. The International journal of health planning and management.

Oloruntoba, R., Sridharan, R., & Davison, G. (2018). A proposed framework of key activities and processes in the preparedness and recovery phases of disaster management. Disasters, 42(3), 541-570.

Parkinson, D., Duncan, A., Davie, S., Archer, F., Sutherland, A., O’Malley, S., … & Gough, M. (2018). Victoria’s gender and disaster taskforce: A retrospective analysis. Australian Journal of Emergency Management, The, 33(3), 50.

Ryan, B. J., Franklin, R. C., Burkle, F. M., Smith, E. C., Aitken, P., Watt, K., & Leggat, P. A. (2018). Ranking and prioritizing strategies for reducing mortality and morbidity from noncommunicable diseases post disaster: An Australian perspective. International journal of disaster risk reduction, 27, 223-238.

Sadhukhan, S., Banerjee, S., Das, P., & Sangaiah, A. K. (2018). Producing Better Disaster Management Plan in Post-Disaster Situation Using Social Media Mining. In Computational Intelligence for Multimedia Big Data on the Cloud with Engineering Applications (pp. 171-183). Academic Press.

Samsuddin, N. M., Takim, R., Nawawi, A. H., & Alwee, S. N. A. S. (2018). Disaster Preparedness Attributes and Hospital’s Resilience in Malaysia. Procedia engineering, 212, 371-378.

Shafique, K., & Warren, C. M. (2018, January). Empowerment and legitimization of effected communities in post-disaster reconstruction. In Procedia engineering (Vol. 212, pp. 1171-1178). Elsevier Ltd.

Smith, K., & Lawrence, G. (2018). From disaster management to adaptive governance? Governance challenges to achieving resilient food systems in Australia. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 20(3), 387-401.

Warnken, J., & Mosadeghi, R. (2018). Challenges of implementing integrated coastal zone management into local planning policies, a case study of Queensland, Australia. Marine Policy, 91, 75-84.

West, C., Casella, E., & Grimes, A. (2017). The Role of Nurses in Disaster Management in Asia Pacific Cyclone Yasi: Far North Queensland, Australia. In The Role of Nurses in Disaster Management in Asia Pacific (pp. 11-23). Springer, Cham.