Create awareness about dengue in your neighbourhood through ‘VETA’
While dengue is spreading rapidly and has become the most serious issue across Sri Lanka, taking necessary precautions and creating awareness among the public of the deadly disease is every citizen’s responsibility.
According to figures published by the epidemiology unit of the Ministry of Health on July 19, 97,125 dengue cases have been reported in the seven months of 2017. Approximately 42.26 per cent of dengue cases were reported from the Western Province while the highest number of cases was reported during the 27th week of 2017.
There are new apps that can help people tackle this crisis like ‘VETA’, an app that comes up with a solution to make people aware of their surroundings. It’s a location based app where people can report dengue cases as well as post images of places where dengue mosquitos could breed. This will make others in the area to be aware.
“We are living in a community where people are very busy with no time to even talk to the neighborhood. Also everyone’s on their phone more than they talk facing each other. The purpose of developing the ‘VETA’ app is to create awareness among the people about the diseases that are spreading in their surroundings,” said VETA co-founder Pradeepan Somasundaram, when the Business Times contacted him recently.
The app was initially developed to report all diseases that are widely spreading around the country. With dengue becoming the deadliest and widely spread disease in the country as of today, Dialog Axiata PLC partnered with ‘VETA’ to promote the app among the public.
Mr. Somasundaram noted that people need not wait for the government to take any steps in order to eradicate dengue. It’s the responsibility of every citizen in the country to keep their surroundings clean and free of dengue breeding sites. “With the partnership with Dialog Axiata PLC, we only allow people to report dengue cases for now,” he added.
An official from Dialog also told the Business Times that a digital solution can make people more aware of their surroundings and solve the biggest issue of dengue spreading in the country. People will start to act when they see a dengue report within their location. While the app can be downloaded free-of-charge, Dialog and VETA are also working together to make the app data or wifi free during usage of the app.
The app allows individuals to set locations that are frequently used such as home, office or school. Along with these frequented locations, users can also set an alert radius from 0.5 to 5 km across which the set locations need to be monitored for cases. The app allows users to report dengue cases along with the incident location and this in turn will serve as an alert to other users in close proximity to that location.
The benefit of the app is that it will enable users to exercise greater vigilance and take extra safeguards in any location that has a relatively higher number of reported incidents.
The app is available in Android and iOS devices and can be viewed on Veta’s website www.veta.life.