Dengue Deterrence

From La Selva, we took a day trip to a nearby community to take a sample of the neighborhood's Dengue knowledge and of mosquito larva in standing water breeding grounds. After splitting into groups, we went house to house, doing that good old public health thang that involves education and intervention! 

Well, what is Dengue? How is it transmitted? These are basic questions we asked people, and then tried to fill in any gaping gaps and encourage prevention practices with our newly-obtained Dengue knowledge caps on! Just kidding, there were no such caps. There were, however, multiple layers of DEET striving to starve any mosquitoes from a blood meal, just in case they wanted to give us a personal lesson in Dengue transmission. I mean, they say learning by doing is best, isn't it?

Not for your health! Dengue is a virus that causes fever, chills, muscle and bone pain, rash and a distinctive pain behind the eyes. Interestingly, the fever spikes in the morning and at night, similarly to how the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits it bites mostly at dawn and dusk. Adding onto these oh-so-pleasant symptoms is just the cherry on top: hemorrhaging! Bleeding from basically anywhere that you can bleed from. There are a few different strains of Dengue, and if you have the disease once and you get a different strain of it a second time, the odds are ever in your favor to get hemorrhagic fever. 

Don't get bitten by this mosquito! 

So focusing these public health lenses, we see image one: no dengue...image two: mild, flu-like dengue...or image three: sweltering blood blisters and potential death within 24 hours from hemorrhagic fever. Image one or two--better or worse? Two or three--better or worse? Well there's no need to pull that awkward optometrist-chair moment, since it's clear that option one would be optimal. And achievable if we hurl a giant road block in the middle of the transmission traffic circle: if they can't breed, they can't transmit! 

So, from house to house we went, alerting people of these aforementioned symptoms and going into backyards to check and overturn anything that could cradle enough water for larvae life. Coconut halves, children's toys, pet water dishes, open wells, and plastic containers are just a handful of the culprits. When we did find some little larvae swimming about the surface of the stagnant water, we scooped then in small tubes, and later looked at them under a microscope-type device to see if they were the species that carried Dengue...and some were! The work we did was through an EBAIS that continuously runs education initiatives like this, so hopefully with persistence, fewer breeding grounds will be present in the future.

A brochure about how to prevent Dengue!

Just to throw in a closer-to-home reason you might want to care about vector control. There's a funny little thing called climate change (and by funny I mean straight up tragic), and when it comes knocking on the door, it does so while holding hands with new diseases in new places. There's currently Dengue present in spots in the Southern US. And here's a kicker: if the global temperature rises just 2 degrees Celscius, the potential Dengue maps grows way out of its typical tropical climate reach, perhaps even penetrating as north as Canada.