Sun Nov 17,12:45 PM ET

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Officials on the U.S.-Mexico border on Sunday stepped up efforts to contain a dengue outbreak in the Mexican city of Matamoros after health authorities confirmed 24 cases and suspected another 222.

Matamoros Public Health Director Ernesto Chanes said six of the suspected cases of dengue in the 450,000-strong city were the potentially lethal hemorrhagic dengue strain. Although, he said to date no deaths had been reported.

Matamoros city workers are spraying neighborhoods where dengue cases have been confirmed and soldiers are patrolling streets looking for stagnant pools of water to contain the outbreak and stop it spreading to the U.S. city of Brownsville, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Chanes said.

Brownsville health director Josue Ramirez said the city was testing mosquitoes on a daily basis to monitor the disease and also spraying to kill off mosquitoes and larvae. To date no case has been confirmed, Ramirez said.

The Matamoros outbreak is one of the most concentrated in Mexico this year. The World Health Organization (news - web sites) (WHO) reported 3,766 cases of classic and hemorrhagic dengue in the first eight months of the year in Mexico as a whole.

Dengue epidemics in Honduras and El Salvador (news - web sites), two Central American nations to the south of Mexico, forced their governments to declare national emergencies in July that freed up funding to fight the spread of the disease.

In Honduras, 16 people died from the 27,113 confirmed cases of dengue up to the end of August, according to WHO statistics. In El Salvador, 10 deaths were reported from the 17,648 confirmed cases in the same time frame.

-- Anonymous, November 18, 2002