Dengue Fever Is a Global Health Concern.

Dengue fever is a global health concern. Traditionally, this mosquito-borne disease affects around one-third of the world's population, living in tropical and subtropical areas of the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the Americas (Guzman, et al., 2013). This means that around 2.5 billion people are at risk for an infection, many of them in countries that have inadequate health care facilities. Indeed, there is currently an outbreak in the Solomon Islands, which has led to Australia and New Zealand sending doctors to deal with the outbreak (ANN, 2013).

Dengue infects as many as 100 million people annually, and there are four dengue viruses. All are spread by mosquitoes, and there are no vaccines (CDC, 2013). Dengue emerged as a global health problem in the 1950s, primarily because the mosquito carriers of the viruses prefer urban environments, which were uncommon in the tropics prior to that time. While incidences in the United States are rare, the disease is a problem in Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa (CDC, 2013). The global dengue map shows that Cameron County in Texas and Monroe County in Florida (primarily the Everglades and the Keys) are at risk for dengue fever (HealthMap.org, 2013).

Lineback and Gritzner (2013) also report incidents in Key West, beginning in 2009. There is considerable risk to people who contract more than one strain of dengue, as the second or subsequent contractions of dengue in the same person often escalate to dengue hemorrhagic fever (Lineback & Gritzner, 2013).

The most common method of managing dengue is through preventative techniques. Typically, eradication of the mosquitoes is the best way to prevent the spread of dengue, since there are no vaccines for the virus. Mosquito eradication programs have reduced the risk of dengue significantly in some areas where it would otherwise be endemic, such as northern Queensland, Australia, Hawaii or French Polynesia. The concern, however, is that in many parts of the tropics there is inadequate ability to manage mosquito populations. Rainy weather is a contributing factor, but so too is poor infrastructure and lack of public funds in impoverished areas of the tropics. Hirschler (2013) notes that because of this, and because of the rapid pace of urbanization in the tropics, dengue infections are likely to escalate as a health problem. Experts have recently upped the estimate of annual infections to 390 million people (Hirschler, 2013). There are fears that the disease will spread to Africa, where conditions for its spread are ripe, and the ability of local health authorities to contain it are often severely limited. Climate change is also making more of the planet a good environment for dengue fever and the aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads it (Hirschler, 2013).