A Fiji woman has died of dengue fever following last month's severe flooding in the Western Division.
The floods forced the evacuation of many hundreds of people and wiped out roads, bridges and crops while creating the perfect breeding ground for a host of water-borne diseases.
Annell Husband reports.
The Commissioner Western Division confirms the woman died of intestinal haemorrhage and an autposy established the cause as dengue fever.
The Fiji Times reports the woman, a 28-year-old mother of one, as having died on Sunday, after Lautoka Hospital failed to admit her four days earlier.
It describes her being sent home and told to return only if she experienced bleeding from the ears and nose.
Commissioner Joeli Cawaki says there are six people with dengue fever, six with leptospirosos and 12 with typhoid and the cases are spread all over the Western Dvision.
He says health authorities are monitoring closely the areas hit by flooding.
"The message to our people in the Western Division is if you can seek, please, call us and we'll come and take you from our homes and take you to the hospital and if there's anything that needs to be done and we will be there."
Commissioner Joeli Cawaki says the authorities will be supporting people in flood-affected areas for the next month.
The Ministry of Health says laboratory tests due back at the end of this week will confirm whether typhoid is present in 51 flood-related, suspected cases.
Last week the Red Cross apologised to the ministry for telling Radio New Zealand International villages had been quarantined because of typhoid.
The ministry's public relations officer, Peni Namotu describes the comment as negative and untrue, saying the ministry's main focus is preventing communicable diseases such as typhoid.
It's not an outbreak. It's something that has been received at the health faciltities. You know, it's something that is normal for any post-flood period. We're expecting prevalence of these communicable diseases but the good news is there hasn't been outbreak of any communicable diseases in affected areas.
Peni Namotu says most of the houses in affected areas have been fumigated and now the weather has cleared the remainder are receiving insecticide treatment.
Preventing communicable diseases is one of the reasons the Ba Town Council worked so hard to clear away stagnant water.
The acting chief executive says the army, fire service, prison inmates and council staff worked back-to-back 12- hour shifts to clear much of the mud and silt from the town's streets and businesses.
Arun Prasad says power has been restored to up to 90 percent of residents and water to 70 percent but getting everything back to normal will take at least a month.
He's asking people to be patient.
There are people very badly affected around Ba, expecially some of the villages and some of the evacuation centres where people were and some of the schools which were affected still not being cleaned, so that is all step-by-step.
Arun Prasad says a railbridge over the Ba River has been fixed up for use by light vehicles and pedestrians while the main road bridge, which was washed away, is rebuilt.
Ba town suffered up to five million US dollars' worth of lost goods and damage to infrastructure.
It last experienced severe flooding in 2009 and Arun Prasad says the interim government is committed to minimising the damage from future floods.
It was a good encouragement when the prime minister was here last week. He has promised the people of Ba that this dredging of drains and the river will start this year and I think that is going to really minimise the level of the flooding. When I say level, that means height. When we have got six to eight feet of water, maybe it'll be only two to three feet of water.
Arun Prasad says many of the town's drains and culverts have already been cleaned.
But perhaps those worst-affected by the floods are the farmers, of whom more than 4,000 lost crops.
The director of extension at the Ministry of Primary Industries says that amounts to more than four million US dollars' worth of local and export okra, chillies, eggplant, leafy vegetables and papaya.
Uraia Waibuta says the ministry and donors are supplying seeds for the replanting of crops intended for the domestic market - but farmers need dry weather for that.
What we intended to do through the rehabilitation programme is just allow the field to dry off before the farmer can come in to replow the land and allow replanting to start. But if rain continues for the next two weeks or so then that will also cause the delay in the implentation of our emergency rehabilitation programme.
Uraia Waibuta says one good thing about the floods is that they've deposited highly fertile silt on the land.
But he says farmers need to start replanting trees in the hills and stop removing them along riverbanks so soil erosion isn't a contributing factor to future flooding.
