A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON EPIDEMIOLOGICAL MAPPING FOR DENGUE CASES IN SINGAPORE AND BANGLADESH

Abstract

Establishing the causal relations of any disease or health event is crucial as to its prediction and protection is concerned. Taking dengue as a model case in the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh and Singapore, this study has ventured to apply an innovative step-by-step approach to find out the causal correlations within the climate-vector-disease associations as well as ecological and human variables in the cities of Dhaka and Singapore. The study has discovered a significant correlation amongst climatic variables and vector availability, ecological factors and vector abundance and between vector concentration and dengue occurrence in temporal and spatial dimensions. Also, the study has been able to establish the variation of dengue incidence in different seasons accounted for 30 years, and long-term trends of climate and dengue incidence over a 10-year period, the study developed a bank of applicable data set which could be used by the enthusiastic researches in the field of the effects of climate change as well as ecology on dengue transmission in Dhaka and Singapore and in the regions of the South and South East Asia at large. Based on the findings, a model mapping system was envisioned to predict the future incidence of dengue and thereby, to predict any such disease or health event and devising prevention guidelines thereto at local, national, regional and global level. In one hand, differences of variables in different cities and regions have been proved as to applying one regional model for another region, on the other hand, incorporating crucial variables in one model through a compare and contrast study enabled to frame a relatively common model mapping system applicable for any given entity of a region. It is a huge enabler on global and regional scale to address the outbreak of any given disease in entities with different economic and geographical setting. Devising this technique of mapping and modelling by addressing Spatial variations is an important novelty of this study. Finding out Temporal variations of variables over time, particularly decadal impact of variables is another xi crucial attribute of the Model to apply it effectively in preventive medicine and urban planning. This research also found that city areas having more built and paved areas and areas with unplanned urbanization had the highest abundance/density of Aedes mosquitoes-the vector of dengue. These results demonstrate that alteration of the ecology in city area is one of the major reasons for the increase of dengue incidence, especially in metropolitan areas. This is a crucial inference as to the dengue prediction and prevention mapping is concerned that, unplanned urbanization, particularly development of shanty slum area is crucial to dengue fever spread. Again, the mapping results of this study has mentionable contributory function to assist in drafting appropriate, differentiated plan, policies and strategies for controlling vectors, i.e. aedes mosquito and preventing the spread of the resultant disease-dengue in the Dhaka city of Bangladesh and Singapore and other vulnerable areas of the regions and the globe at large.