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More than 20,000 school children have been reportedly affected by dengue. Children aged between 7 and 17 have accounted for 18% of 113,500 dengue cases in Malaysia as of 1^st December, revealed the deputy education minister P. Kamalanathan. "The Education and Health Ministries will be monitoring the situation and working with the community. Parent-teacher associations also need to work together with the authorities," he said at the Dengue Patrol Program 2015 Awards Presentation Ceremony in Kuala Lumpur, recently. This new program has been designed to educate the students about the danger of dengue and to give them a sense of responsibility to adopt dengue prevention methods, as reported by The Star Online.

This program was set-up in collaboration of Sanofi Pasteur, a pharmaceutical company, and the respective ministries. Kamalanathan also said that the education ministry is promoting the public-private partnerships. The collaboration for formed to see how the particiapnts of the program are able to educate more students and bring the program to as many as schools as possible. "The programme began in 2011 with three schools but today we have 156 schools (participating)," he said, saying that he was hoping to add more schools to the program in the future, said The Star Online

Even though there are 10,000 schools in the country, there was no urgency showed by the authorities to initiate the partnership. Dr. Zailiza Suli, Principal Assistant Director Health Ministry disease control division said that there has been a spike in the number of dengue cases this year in comparison to last year. There has also been an increase in the number of deaths caused by dengue. Managing director of Sanofi Pasteur, Baptiste De Clarens said that they have been working for 20 years on research and development of dengue vaccine, said The Star Online.