Focus on Focus Earth: How Do You Fight Dengue Fever in a City With a 78% Infection Rate?

Matamoros, Mexico sits just across the Rio Grande from the Texas border town of Brownsville, and unless current efforts are able to keep an already rampant disease under some kind of control, Dengue could cross the border into the U.S. rather soon.

A 2005 investigation in Brownsville and Matamoros showed a 50-year high for prevalence of human anti-dengue antibodies in the continental U.S., and while the infection rate in Matamoros is much higher than Brownsville, many of the same risk factors existed in both cities, leading to questions about the influences on transmission of disease in each.

One of the findings? Unsurprisingly, that collections of tires just lying around were providing breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Standing water is, famously, probably the #1 thing to avoid if you don't want mosquitoes around—and who does?

Extermination efforts have reduced mosquito populations in some places around Matamoros by going around and actually spraying larvacide in these kinds of areas that are so attractive to mosquitoes.

Officials are also doing outreach, to find out what people in the community know about the disease, how it is transmitted, and how they can take part in preventing it—including steps like eliminating waste tire breeding sites.

Such efforts obviously cannot cover every inch of the city, however, so the challenge remains: how to fight a disease that worldwide has risen thirtyfold in the last half century, and that experts believe to now be the most worrisome of insect-transmitted diseases?

See Matamoros up close when Focus Earth's Bob Woodruff travels there to learn more about ongoing efforts to combat Dengue fever.

Watch Focus Earth: The New Dawn of Disease on Planet Green.

This post was inspired by Focus Earth.