The health of humans - Dengue outbreak
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DAT FOR 2004. DALY = DISABILITY-ADJUSTED LIFE YEAR, OR THE NUMBER OF YEARS LOST DUE TO ILL-HEALTH, DISABILITY OR EARLY DEATH. SOURCE: WHO
Something you should know about me: mosquitoes love me (maybe you shouldn’t know that, but it is what it is). My mamma always said that it was because my blood was sweeter than others. Well, it turns out this is a real thing, some people are sweeter to mosquitoes than others.
All of this to say that I follow closely any news of mosquito-borne diseases, and it looks like Vietnam is having an outbreak of dengue fever. In the first six months, 81,132 people have been hit, (representing a 310% increase for the country as a whole. Of these cases, more than 24,000 are in Saigon, or a 176% increase over last year. From 2004-10, the average number of dengue fever cases in Vietnam was 91,321.
Not to make it all about me, but I know I’m going to get dengue.
A few stats about the disease:
DATA FOR 2004. SOURCE: WHO
1 in four people infected with dengue will get sick, with symptoms either mild or severe.
1 in 20 people who get sick with dengue will develop severe dengue. Severe dengue can be life-threatening within a few hours and often requires hospitalization.
There is no cure for dengue.
A recent vaccine in the Philippines actually made people worse (we talked about this when talking about measles in the Philippines, scroll down to May 24, 2019). It is still approved for use in the EU and the US, but only with pretty severe restrictions.
Four people have died in Vietnam so far this year.
Vietnam has actually been much better than other countries in ASEAN in terms of cases and deaths from dengue. It was lower than Thailand and many other countries. This is for both deaths and DALY (or disability-adjusted life year), which calculates the number of years lost to sickness, disability and death. (See charts above to the right) This year will probably change these statistics a lot.
What can countries do to stop dengue?
It doesn’t seem like a vaccine is going to come along anytime soon, so countries are trying for other solutions. Interestingly, only female mosquitoes bite, and only Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus spread dengue, yellow fever, zika among other bad diseases. Mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus spread malaria.
Singapore and Indonesia are trying novel ways of limiting dengue. The main way is by distributing mosquitoes infected by the Wolbachia bacteria, which does allow males to fertilize females and also protects females from dengue and Zika. It looks like it is working so far in Singapore and in Indonesia. According to these reports, Vietnam is also trying it, but obviously it hasn’t started working.
In that New York Times article, the kicker is that eventually, effectiveness will drop off, and we will have to find some new way to fight mosquitoes and mosquito-borne illnesses. Maybe a vaccine will come through at some point that will limit the negative effects. Of course, then we have to worry about anti-vaxxers, which are already a problem in Vietnam.