The city state’s Ministry of Health said on Sunday that it had seen 41 locally transmitted cases of the virus.
Advertisement
“Pregnant women should adopt strict mosquitoes precaution if travelling to an affected area”. In the first half of this year, tourism arrivals reached nearly 8.2 million, compared with around 7.3 million in the same period of last year.
As of August 28, 41 cases of locally transmitted Zika virus infection had been confirmed in Singapore, the country’s Ministry of Health and National Environment Agency said Sunday. At least three dozen patients have made a full recovery. Symptoms of the virus include fever, rash, headache, muscle ache and conjunctivitis, although some carriers may not have any symptoms. FairPrice supermarkets and Watsons pharmacies said their sales of such products had doubled.
Most of the early infections were among foreign workers, hundreds of thousands of whom, mainly from the Asian sub-continent, work on Singapore’s construction sites and in the marine sector.
The Singapore government has not said where the infected foreign workers are from. The majority of those infected were foreign workers, but the government has not disclosed their nationalities.
The department’s Assistant Secretary Charles Jose said they have instructed their embassy personnel in Singapore to “immediately issue an advisory to the Filipino community to take precautionary measure to minimize the risk of being infected with the deadly virus”. Officials sprayed insecticide in the area and removed any potential breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes, such as stagnant water or moist dirt in abandoned drains.
NEA has served notices to over 400 “inaccessible premises”, asking owners to contact it to arrange for an inspection.
National Environmental Agency (NEA) officers gather before inspecting homes at a residential block at the Aljunied neighbourhood in Singapore on August 30, 2016. It caused clusters of human infections from the 1960s to 1980s across Africa and Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
WHO declared Zika a global health emergency because of its link with microcephaly.
Advertisement
Numerous initial cases were foreign workers on a condominium project.
