"Dengue fever is not just urban or rural: Reframing its spatial categorization."

ABSTRACT: Infectious diseases exploit niches that are often spatially defined as urban and/or rural. Yet spatial research on infectious diseases often fails to define "urban" and "rural" and how these contexts might influence their epidemiology. We use dengue fever, thought to be mostly an urban disease with rural foci, as a device to explore local definitions of urban and rural spaces and the impact of these spaces on dengue risk in the province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador. Ecuador, like many countries, only uses population size and administrative function to define urban and rural locales. Interviews conducted from 2019 to 2021 with 71 residents and 23 health personnel found that they identified the availability of basic services, extent of their control over their environment, and presence of underbru

SUBMITTER: Trostle JA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12665285 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature