Abstract
Dengue fever is making a significant comeback globally and its control still depends largely on residents’ actions. Community awareness and education are central to its management; however, programmes have had limited impact, because they are often based on short-term research and limited awareness of the socio-ecological contexts wherein local knowledge of dengue and its vectors (lay entomology) is produced and enacted in and through place. Long-term studies of lay knowledge of dengue vectors are very rare, even though they are essential to the development of effective, targeted community education campaigns and mobilisation. In this paper, we examine the popular belief that dengue vector, Aedes aegypti, is ubiquitous in the north Australian landscape and demonstrate how local typologies of water are central to the reasoning underwriting this assumption. We show how these logics are fortified by people’s lived experiences of mosquitoes and the watery abodes they are thought to reside in, as well as through key messages from health education. We posit that long term, context-sensitive research approaches are better able to identify, understand and later address and challenge assumptions and may be more effective at informing, empowering and mobilizing the public to combat dengue fever.
Highlights
Interactions and relationships between mosquitoes, dengue viruses, and human beings have a long, dynamic, and complex history
While dengue viruses are transported across regions and between countries by human beings, subsequently being contracted and transmitted by female mosquito vectors to other humans, it is the viruses that are on the move
For the 26 years, there were no recorded incidents of dengue fever in Australia until 1981, following the establishment of an international airport, where an outbreak was recorded in the city of Cairns in northern Australia [12,13,14]
Summary
Interactions and relationships between mosquitoes, dengue viruses, and human beings have a long, dynamic, and complex history. While dengue viruses are transported across regions and between countries by human beings, subsequently being contracted and transmitted by female mosquito vectors to other humans, it is the viruses that are on the move. In these human–insect entanglements, mosquito vectors are appearing in new places, or returning to regions previously deemed free of both the vectors and the disease, including northeast Australia, the site of this study. The virus is not currently endemic in northern Australia, all four dengue viruses were recorded in human beings returning to or arriving in the region. Over the last 15 years, outbreaks of dengue fever became a common, usually annual, occurrence in northeastern Australia, coinciding with the monsoon or wet season
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