In response to local dengue outbreaks and international Zika outbreaks, the Executive Yuan held the first Major Vector-Borne Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Joint Meeting at the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control (Taiwan CDC) on April 18, 2016.　　Premier Chang San-cheng (張善政) personally attended the meeting and instructed all relevant agencies to remember the lessons learned from the outbreak last year and host a Joint Meeting monthly as we enter this year’s dengue season.

The Meeting was co-chaired by the Health and Welfare Minister Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌) and the Deputy Minister of the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) Chang Zi-jing (張子敬). During the remarks delivered by Premier Chang, he pointed out that as both dengue and Zika viruses are transmitted by infected Aedes mosquitoes, they should be considered as the same type of infectious diseases. Furthermore, based on the last year experience, prevention efforts should be implemented earlier this year. The central government agencies will clean and remove vector breeding sites at houses and buildings managed by the central government to eliminate any possible vector breeding sites and EPA will be responsible to strengthen the supervision of the cleaning activity.　Additionally, EPA has planned a three-level mobilization plan to reinforce the cleaning and removing of vector breeding sites at local villages. 　

Simultaneously, Taiwan CDC announced the implementation of the “Dengue Elimination Rewards for 300 Villages Program”, which regard local heads of villages (村里長) as the front-line disease prevention and control workers for the first time and have them promote community-level dengue prevention and control efforts. The villages with the highest decrease in the number of cases will be rewarded. There is a total of 7,851 villages in Taiwan.　The first 300 villages worst hit by dengue have accumulated a total of 43,693 confirmed dengue cases between April 2015 and March 2016, accounting for 67.9% of the total confirmed cases in Taiwan. Among these villages, the highest number of cases reported is 332 and the lowest number of cases reported is 48. Taiwan CDC is in the process of contacting these local village heads to provide them with relevant information on dengue prevention and control and necessary assistance to encourage community participation.

To speed up the process of case reporting, the age and disease severity restrictions on the use of dengue NS1 antigen test have been removed. Beginning April 21, all primary care clinics can report cases through the National Health Insurance website in order to reduce the paperwork burden. 　

As global warming has facilitated the spread of vector-borne infectious diseases, local heads of villages will play a critical role in the control and prevention of these diseases since community participation and environmental management of mosquito populations are vital in such efforts. To provide real-time updates on outbreaks in local villages for the public, a national dengue fever prevention and control website (dengue.gov.tw) was set up for public access in order to facilitate the implementation of prompt prevention and control measures.