Women more vulnerable to mosquito-borne disease: Study
The research focused on a small rural village in Bangladesh
The outbreak of mosquito-borne disease chikungunya appears to be driven by infections cantered in and around the home, with women significantly more likely to become ill, suggests a new research.
The research was carried out by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Institut Pasteur in Paris and icddr,b.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer key insights into how health officials can combat other diseases that spread the same way, including Zika.
The research focused on a small rural village in Bangladesh, but offered a new path for investigating and responding to outbreaks large and small for a variety of diseases transmitted via the Aedes mosquito, which also includes dengue and yellow fever, said icddrb.
Typically, when theres an outbreak, we study who is sick and try to understand why, says the first author Henrik Salje, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a visiting scientist at Institut Pasteur.
In this case, we not only studied those who became infected with chikungunya, but also those who avoided illness. This allowed us to determine what factors may impact who comes down with a disease and who does not - and to help us determine the best way to intervene. For the study, researchers investigated a 2012 chikungunya outbreak in Palpara, a village 60 miles off Dhaka.
The team visited every household at the village and interviewed 1,933 individuals from 460 households.
A total of 364 people (18 per cent) reported having symptoms consistent with chikungunya (fever with severe joint pain or rash) between May 29 and December 1, 2012.
Even though chikungunya is transmitted via mosquito - and not by coming into close contact with someone who is ill - the researchers found that more than a quarter of human infections spread within the same household and that half of infections occurred in households less than 200 meters away.
This was an unexpected finding, the researchers say.
They also looked at the movement habits of the wider Bangladeshi population and learned that women in the country spend 66 per cent of their time during the day at home while men spend 45 per cent at home.
Coupled with the tendency of infected mosquitoes not to travel far, this made being at home an important determinant for becoming infected during the chikungunya outbreak.
We had good reason to suspect that women in Bangladesh spend a lot more time at home than men Emily Gurley, co-senior author and director of the emerging pathogens programme at icddr,b says.
Outbreaks of viruses such as dengue and Zika that are spread by the same mosquito as chikungunya are likely to disproportionately affect women in such communities, too.
Overall, the researchers found that women at Palpara were 1.5 times more likely to develop chikungunya than men. They also found that coils designed to repel mosquitoes did not work to prevent transmission in this region.
