Cases of dengue, a debilitating mosquito-borne disease normally associated with poor countries, reached 546 in the week ending September 2, the highest for a seven-day period in official records, the health ministry said Friday, Sept 9.

More than 8800 people have been diagnosed with dengue in Singapore since the start of the year, compared to 9459 for all of 2004, which was the highest for a single year in a decade.

Eight people have succumbed to the disease this year with the latest victim a 41-year-old church pastor.

Public hospitals are straining to cope with the outbreak and have postponed non-urgent operations in order to free up space for dengue patients, local media reports said.

The last time public hospitals here had to delay non-urgent surgeries was in 2003 during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak which killed 33 people out of 238 infections locally.

As the dengue outbreak showed no signs of abating despite tougher measures enforced by authorities, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan called for coordinated measures similar to those adopted to break SARS transmission in 2003.

"Let's take a SARS approach to this," Khaw was quoted as saying by the Straits Times. "This problem is simpler than SARS. If you stop the mosquitoes, you break the chain."

New measures were announced last month to curb the spread of the dengue virus with authorities stepping up checks on mosquito breeding sites and launching a map on the Internet listing the "hotspots" for the carrier insects.

Private homes are the main breeding grounds for mosquitoes, accounting for 55 percent of all those found. In the past, construction sites were the main source of dengue carrier insects.

Singapore, better known overseas for its sparkling streets and modern buildings, experienced its worst dengue outbreak in a decade last year, with 9,459 cases reported, almost double the 2003 figure.

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