danger zones red areas are at high risk of developing dengue. green areas are low risk.
Jane Messina
The red of the area that you live on the map to the right, the greater the risk of contracting dengue, a painful viral disease that further research is much more widespread than previously thought.
There is no vaccine, nor are there drugs to treat dengue, which is spread by mosquitoes and known colloquially as "breakbone fever" for the pain it produces. Severe dengue patients recover spontaneously with medical support, but complications sometimes lead to death. There are four types of viruses. Infection immunizes you to this particular type of dengue for life, but infection with a second type increases the probability of a serious illness.
"Dengue is one of the few infectious diseases increasing its global spread and the number of cases per year," said Jeremy Farrar, clinical and infectious disease specialist at the University of Oxford Unit clinical research in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. For public health interventions are effective, "it is crucial that we understand where the disease is present and have an understanding of where it can be tomorrow." But knowledge of dengue was based on incomplete reports, a lack of data on mild cases, and rough approximations that produced "back-of-the-envelope estimates," says Farrar.
to get a better handle on the spread and incidence of the disease, Farrar and epidemiologist Simon Hay of Oxford University in the UK formed a team who compiled 8,300 reports of dengue cases and considered a new evidence on risk factors such as population growth in urban areas where the virus-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito develops and may bite more humans in rapid succession. Then, using new techniques modeling, they concluded that in 2010, dengue has sent 96 million people in clinics or did miss school or work, while another 294 million had mild or asymptomatic infections. The total of 30 million is more than three times the cases of dengue from 50 to 100 million annual currently supported by the World Health Organization (WHO), the ratio of online research today Nature .
Duane Gubler, a dengue expert at Duke University-National Graduate Medical School Singapore Singapore who was not involved in the study, is relieved. "Finally, there is good data based on evidence that confirms what I am saying for years, that the" low ball to WHO figures grossly underestimate the true burden of dengue. "If anything, Gubler suspect the estimate is low because, among other things, the team drew on some community-based studies childhood infections in adults when the rates may be higher. "However, I think it is an excellent article that will greatly contribute to our understanding of this disease," adds he.
The new results will not affect the clinical management of dengue . But the authors believe their more precise mapping of the distribution of the disease and the best estimate of total infections will help those responsible for public health planning efforts against mosquitoes and future vaccination campaigns and measure their impact . And, Farrar said, the team intends to continue to refine what he says is always an estimate of the burden of disease, using better data as it becomes available.
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