One of our city's familiar sounds is the approaching drone of a fumigation fogger spewing thick white plumes of insecticide, part of so-far futile efforts to arrest a spiraling dengue fever outbreak.
I remember shortly after we moved to Indo, our neighborhood was fogged, and the thick smoke entered every room of our house. I had no idea what was going on...
Dengue fever, a mosquito-born virus, is less lethal than Ebola, but in a worst-case scenario causes internal bleeding, organ failure and death. It is spreading so far and so fast, The World Health Organisation deems it one of the fastest-growing global health threats, contracted by 50-100 million people each year. Like the Ebola virus, it has no vaccine to prevent it or drug to treat it. And while it is endemic mostly to warm, humid areas of the globe, the range of the virus could be widened by infected travellers, as well.
While Ebola has killed nearly 5,000 people this year, mainly in West Africa, with an estimated 13,000 infections, dengue kills up to 20,000 annually, and 40% of the world’s population live in dengue-risk areas.
Indonesia saw 121,000 cases in 2013, up 30%, with 871 dead. The virus is spreading from urban to rural areas.
Indonesia has released genetically engineered mosquitoes whose offspring are sterile in hopes of controlling the Aedes aegypti mosquito which carries dengue, but the method’s efficacy remains unconfirmed.
Most of this comes from an article on the dengue-ebola comparison, you can read the full article here.
