Science experts are going high-tech in the fight against the deadly dengue disease, joining hands with the Quezon City government to strike at the root of the problem with the help of global positioning system (GPS) locators.
Since last month, researchers of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (DBMB) at The University of the Philippines (UP) Manila have been working with the city’s health department to gather more information about the mosquito which carries the disease.
Project coordinator Dr. Francisco Heralde III of UP Manila described the six-month team-up as a comprehensive and proactive effort to deal with the dengue problem in the city which has reported an increase in the number of cases since the start of the year.
According to him, by learning more about the dengue carriers and passing on the information to community leaders, officials can immediately determine possible sites for an outbreak and map out a plan to reduce or even prevent the prevalence of cases.
To do this, the team will rely on ovitraps to determine the mosquitos present in an area and the type of dengue virus they carry.
An ovitrap is a small black container filled with water and a chemical solution designed to attract mosquitos. Once they lay their eggs, however, the larvae can be killed within days to prevent these from developing into adults.
The collected samples will then be sent to the DBMB laboratory for processing. Once the results are out, these will be posted on a web site to be set up and run by the department’s graduate students.
For the collection of the samples, the researchers picked three areas in Old Balara which has posted the highest increase in dengue cases in Quezon City since the start of the year.
Of the houses in each of the areas, 15 were picked at random. Homeowners received six ovitraps—three to be placed inside the house and the rest to remain outside. A GPS locator was installed in each house to pinpoint the exact area of mosquito infestation.
According to Heralde, the devices will give the members of the team a universal point of reference.
By pinpointing the exact location of the source of the samples through GPS locators, stakeholders can validate the study’s findings as they can use the coordinates for reference, he explained.
Despite the best efforts of local officials, there has been a rise in dengue cases in Quezon City this year as compared to 2011. Dr. Rolando Cruz, an epidemiologist of the city’s health department, said that 2,400 cases had been reported as of June 9, up 15 percent compared to the same period last year, with 15 deaths recorded.
At present, most local government units depend on hospitals for information about the prevalence of dengue in their respective areas. Patterned after the Philippine Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response System, sentinel hospitals submit reports to LGUs which, in turn, use the data to calculate the severity of the deadly disease in a particular area. When a place has been identified as having an increasing number of cases, health workers are deployed to address the problem by conducting fogging operations, cleanup drives and information dissemination campaigns.
Heralde, however, said that this setup was largely reactive in nature. “Since [LGUs] rely on the number of people infected [in an area], this means that the virus has already spread before they can even deal with it.” He also noted that “it may take a week or two for health officials to receive the report, make sense of the data and act on it.”
But with the results of the study, health authorities will know exactly in what areas they should concentrate their dengue-fighting efforts. As Heralde himself put it, the project aims to “institutionalize sustainable evidence-based community-based intervention for the prevention and control of dengue” by providing real-time monitoring for early warning and prompt intervention against the disease.