Mosquitos carrying the Dengue virus don’t care about governmental categorizations of ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’
According to the World Health Organization, dengue is a disease carried by mosquitos that "live in urban habitats." By that logic, rural communities should be mostly safe from dengue. However, the disease is currently spreading across Borbon, a town in northern Ecuador that government officials classify as rural. What's going on?
Terms like urban and rural have more to do with politics than public health, says Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of Epidemiology and Global Public Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “Viruses don’t follow these politically defined entities,” he recently told Science News.
Misunderstandings over what constitutes an urban or rural area have broad public health implications. Classifying dengue as “urban” influences where governments search, track, and work to prevent these diseases and shapes how people respond to such efforts.
In Ecuador, diverging definitions of urban and rural stem from different bases of measurement. Government officials base their classifications on population density while residents often base their classifications on access to government services and amenities such as clean water supply and paved roads. These differences in definitions mean that official guidance doesn’t match local realities of effective prevention.
Eisenberg argues that curbing mosquito-borne disease transmission worldwide requires overlaying urban-rural maps with other measures of disease risk that give less weight to the perspectives of distant bureaucrats and center mosquitoes and the people exposed to them. Assemblage theory, for instance, would identify ecological pockets friendly to A. aegypti, a type of mosquitoes that can spread dengue and Zika. Political ecology theories, meanwhile, would factor in the structural forces that facilitate disease transmission, such as unreliable municipal services.
Understanding how mosquito-borne diseases spread is a pressing public health need as the climate warms and mosquitos find more hospitable regions in which to thrive, says Eisenberg. Getting this right matters.
Read the Science News article: Dengue is classified as an urban disease. Mosquitoes don’t care
Related study: “Dengue fever is not just urban or rural: Reframing its spatial categorization.” Social Science & Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.117384
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