The dengue fever has left 37 dead in the Dominican Republic, according to news from Santo Domingo, capital of the Caribbean country, on Monday.

A man aged 33 and a six-year-old girl died of the disease on the weekend, local health authorities said, noting the country has found 3,562 cases of dengue fever so far this year.

"The outbreak is in decline," Bautista Rojas Gomez, Secretary of State for Public Health told local media on Monday.

"We are improving the measures already established in public hospitals to reduce the number of those affected," he said.

Local health authorities said only 38 were considered potentially infected among the 2,180 patients observed from early Saturday to early Sunday.

The recent wave of patients flooding emergency rooms at hospitals in Santo Domingo were due to fears rather than the virus itself, hospital doctors told local media.

Dengue fever, a viral infection spread by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, is a serious health problem in many Central American and Caribbean countries. Its symptoms include high fever, nausea, rash, backache and headache. Most mainstream dengue cases are not fatal, but the hemorrhagic variant, which causes severe internal bleeding as blood vessels collapse, kills one in 20 of the infected.

The World Health Organization said the only way to fight dengue is to stamp out mosquitoes, which reproduce in bodies of water from puddles to lakes and reservoirs. Some 50 million people are infected with dengue each year, most of them in the tropical regions.

(Xinhua News Agency September 26, 2006)