JEDDAH, 6 June 2007 — Jeddah Mayor Adel Fakieh announced that the municipality has doubled its sanitization budget for cleaning the city, to SR900 million for the next five years.
The approved budget would be distributed to cover both long-term and urgent projects, such as improving water quality of the city’s lagoons, putting order to districts that have been developed with disregard to zoning laws, and the ongoing annual fight against the spread of the mosquito-borne dengue fever.
The mayor made his announcement on Monday during the inauguration of the third phase of the municipality’s Dengue Fever Campaign. The mayor inaugurated the campaign by personally spraying a number of houses in Al-Sabeel district in downtown Jeddah. “Last year around 82 cases of dengue fever were reported in one week, while this year it has not exceeded four cases,” he said adding that currently around 250 cases of dengue fever are reported weekly in Singapore, knowing that they are a leading country in fighting the disease.
The mayor said that so far the municipality officials and their affiliates have managed to spray 240,000 housing units with pesticides during the past year.
He said that the team includes for the first time over 160 volunteering Saudi youth who participated in spraying the houses. The youth were given a one-week course on how to use the spraying equipment and learn the techniques of fighting mosquitoes. He noted that so far, the municipality team has eliminated a large number of breeding grounds for the mosquitoes — pools of standing water — that carry the disease, and have replaced old water tanks over houses with new sealed ones.
“The team has also placed special nets in windows of old houses and helped in sanitizing each and every house in various districts around the city,” the mayor said.
Abdulghaffar Al-Azhari, head of health prevention at the municipality, said that the first two phases of the campaign had been completed successfully covering more than 100,000 housing units mostly in areas with large populations of mosquitoes, including Um Al-Salam area to the south, Al-Mamiah district and Khozam.
The campaign also included spraying more than 60,000 schools, greenhouses, factories and construction sites.
The third phase of the dengue-abatement campaign has just begun. Al-Azhari added that the fighting team would give away more than 10,000 new water containers that were specially designed to prevent breeding of mosquitoes. The campaign also aims at distributing more than 1,000 mosquito traps in houses located in increasingly infected areas, he said adding that they are working on increasing the number of traps to 1,500 soon. The municipality’s special laboratory, which is considered the first of its kind in the Kingdom, is constantly working on research and development on best methods to eliminate the mosquitoes, he noted.
