The fight against dengue has gone up a notch: 11 key scientific bodies have come together to prevent, treat, and eradicate the spread of the virus.

The 11 bodies are DSO National Laboratories, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore, Experimental Therapeutics Centre (A*STAR), Genome Institute of Singapore (A*STAR), Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (A*STAR), NTU, National Environment Agency, National Healthcare Group, NUS, Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases, Singapore Health Services.

Each of the organisations has a different specialty and they have joined forces to form the Singapore Dengue Consortium.

Despite infecting 50 to 100 million people each year, there are currently no vaccines or drug therapies to combat dengue and the consortium hopes to plug this gap.

Dr Ooi Eng Eoung, Programme Director, Biological Defence, DSO National Laboratories, said: "It's a problem not unique to Singapore, many other countries in Southeast Asia are seeing the same rise in dengue cases. Exactly why we have so many dengue cases despite the mosquito control is something we're trying to understand."

So far, it is already known that Singapore's population is about 10 times less immune to the virus compared to other countries with dengue problems.

Also, the majority of dengue cases in Singapore does not cause the more serious hemorrhagic symptoms.

Dr Ooi said: "We are trying to understand who are those who when infected with dengue will develop severe illness and who are those that will not develop severe illness. And if we can understand this at the beginning, we can segregate people and say now this group is more likely to make a turn for the worse, therefore they should be admitted to the hospital and managed more closely. There is this big group that would be very sick, but not much is going to happen to them so they can be managed in a clinic, they don't need to overburden the hospitals."

By tapping on consortium partners with expertise in analyzing proteins, genomes and immune systems the group hopes to see concrete results in two years. - CNA/ch