{"id":182080,"date":"2024-11-25T14:43:41","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T14:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/25\/dengue-is-classified-as-an-urban-disease-mosquitoes-dont-care\/"},"modified":"2024-11-25T14:43:41","modified_gmt":"2024-11-25T14:43:41","slug":"dengue-is-classified-as-an-urban-disease-mosquitoes-dont-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/25\/dengue-is-classified-as-an-urban-disease-mosquitoes-dont-care\/","title":{"rendered":"Dengue is classified as an urban disease. Mosquitoes don\u2019t care"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"text-align:center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"763\" height=\"456\" src=\"https:\/\/i3.wp.com\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/survey_cta_footprint.jpg?resize=763,456&amp;ssl=1\" class=\"attachment-post-thumbnail size-post-thumbnail wp-post-image\" alt=\"Dengue is classified as an urban disease. Mosquitoes don\u2019t care\" title=\"Dengue is classified as an urban disease. Mosquitoes don\u2019t care\" \/><\/div> \r\n<br><div data-component=\"video-embed\">\n\t\t\t\t\n\n\n\n\n<p>The town of Borb\u00f3n in northern Ecuador is home to several government and religious offices and a regional hospital. Nonetheless, Ecuador classifies Borb\u00f3n as rural. That designation implies that Borb\u00f3n\u2019s residents should be relatively safe from dengue, a disease carried by a species of mosquito that, according to the World Health Organization, \u201clives in urban habitats and breeds mostly in man-made containers.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S0277953624008384?via%3Dihub\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">dengue is spreading across Borb\u00f3n<\/a>, where the density of these <em>Aedes aegypti <\/em>mosquitos can mirror that of urban areas, researchers report in the October <em>Social Science and Medicine<\/em>. Terms like <em>urban<\/em> and <em>rural<\/em> have more to do with politics than public health, says epidemiologist Joseph Eisenberg of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. \u201cViruses don\u2019t follow these politically defined entities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n<aside class=\"sn-conversion rich-text rich-text--with-sidebar\">\n<style><![CDATA[\n.email-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  color: white;\n  margin-top: 50px;\n  background-image: url(\"\/wp-content\/themes\/sciencenews\/client\/src\/images\/cta-module@2x.jpg\");\n  padding: 20px;\n  clear: both;\n}\n\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"rich-text embedded-conversion-content is-layout-flow wp-block-group-is-layout-flow\">\n<a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/forms\/d\/e\/1FAIpQLSf83OekELCTbhuYw3Iu-p8OWiE9-uE56ZFNbeTapotBaa1rIg\/viewform?usp=sf_link\">\n  <\/a><\/div><a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/forms\/d\/e\/1FAIpQLSf83OekELCTbhuYw3Iu-p8OWiE9-uE56ZFNbeTapotBaa1rIg\/viewform?usp=sf_link\">\n<\/a>\n\n<style><![CDATA[\n#dynamic-conversion {\n  border: 1px solid #ffcccb;\n  max-width: 100%;\n  height: auto;\n  clear: both;\n}\n]]><\/style>\n\n\n\n\n<\/aside>\n\n\n<p>Misunderstandings over what constitutes an urban or rural area have broad public health implications. Classifying dengue as urban or malaria as rural influences where governments search, track and work to prevent these diseases, leaving less definable regions behind. Those misunderstandings also shape how people respond to such efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Ecuador, government officials tend to use population density as shorthand for applying the label \u201curban\u201d or \u201crural\u201d to a parish, similar to a town or city in the United States. But the almost 100 people Eisenberg\u2019s team interviewed across Esmeraldas province, which includes Borb\u00f3n, often used a different shorthand \u2014 access to government services and amenities, such as trash pickup, a clean water supply and paved roads. Urban areas had such amenities, people said, while rural areas did not.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Those diverging definitions mean official guidance often doesn\u2019t match local realities. Public health officials in Ecuador request that people living in designated urban areas empty or cover any sources of open water \u2014 primary sites for <em>A. agypti <\/em>mosquitos to lay eggs. Such open sources can include water stored in pots outside or items like trash can lids and flowerpots that collect rainwater. But many people live in neighborhoods classified as rural that have the infrastructure and population density reflective of a city \u2014 think Borb\u00f3n.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Others, meanwhile, live in neighborhoods classified as urban but lack adequate municipal services and amenities. Residents in such areas say that the onus lies on the government to build the infrastructure needed to block spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The country\u2019s health officials occasionally distribute bed nets to residents (itself a questionable approach, as dengue-carrying mosquitos are daytime biters). But residents in Esmeraldas say that the purported goals of bed nets still miss the point. Mosquitos swarm puddles in areas without paved roads and storm drains, one resident said. Unless the government fixes those roads, people will continue getting sick from dengue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Access to more structural services and other amenities do, in fact, appear to be larger drivers of dengue infections than even mosquito abundance, says Sadie Jane Ryan, a medical geographer with the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her work in southern Ecuador has shown, for instance, that widespread availability of air conditioning can reduce dengue, even in areas with many disease-carrying mosquitos. Meanwhile, inadequate plumbing and trash collection increase the risk of dengue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Ryan\u2019s research, reported in 2021<em>, <\/em>also showed <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.plos.org\/plosntds\/article?id=10.1371\/journal.pntd.0009257\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the unique dangers associated with oft-neglected areas<\/a> that fall somewhere between the urban\u2013rural dichotomy. People in households with reliable water rarely store water outside, while people in households without plumbing do store water outside but cycle through it quickly, Ryan says. \u201cIn that really interesting middle zone where \u2026 [people] don\u2019t reliably have access to water, [they] tend to store water long enough for mosquitoes to breed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Eisenberg and colleagues argue that curbing mosquito-borne disease transmission worldwide requires overlaying urban-rural maps with other measures of disease risk that decenter the perspectives of distant bureaucrats and center mosquitoes and the people exposed to them. Assemblage theory, for instance, would identify ecological pockets friendly to <em>A. aegypti<\/em>. Political ecology theories, meanwhile, would factor in the structural forces that facilitate disease transmission, such as unreliable municipal services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Understanding how mosquito-borne diseases spread is a pressing public health concern as the climate warms and mosquitos find <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/extreme-heat-rain-dengue-outbreak\">more hospitable climates<\/a> in which to thrive (<em>SN: 8\/26\/24<\/em>). So getting this right matters, say Eisenberg and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWhere do epidemiologists \u2026 get the notion that \u2018urban\u2019 and \u2018rural\u2019 make sense as disease descriptors?\u201d asks James Trostle, a medical anthropologist at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and a coauthor of the new study. \u201cThe mosquito cares about where it can live.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\t\t\t<\/div>\r\n<br>\r\n<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/article\/dengue-mosquitoes-urban-rural-disease\">Source link <\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The town of Borb\u00f3n in northern Ecuador is home to several government and religious offices and a regional hospital. Nonetheless, Ecuador classifies Borb\u00f3n as rural. That designation implies that Borb\u00f3n\u2019s residents should be relatively safe from dengue, a disease carried by a species of mosquito that, according to the World Health Organization, \u201clives in urban [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182081,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencenews.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/survey_cta_footprint.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[606],"tags":[3755,1285,29473,8069,553,47719,3669],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182080"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182080"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":182082,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182080\/revisions\/182082"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}