of those weeks where at the end of it
you just feel drained tired and ready to
relax so maybe you come home you pull
yourself a cold drink and you’re ready
to go sit outside on the patio and enjoy
the beautiful sunset so you go outside
and you’re just starting to settle in
and relax when you realize you’re not
alone
the first one strikes oh yeah you
guessed it it’s a mosquito yeah they’re
annoying they cause a lot of it eNOS
they’re bothersome and they can ruin
your evening outside but as an
infectious disease epidemiologist
they’re more than just a nuisance to me
half of the world’s population is at
risk for vector-borne and mosquito-borne
illnesses 1 billion people each year are
so now we live in Arizona there aren’t
as many mosquitoes as there are other
places but now picture this you’ve
gotten a whole two weeks off it’s time
to go have a vacation and you’re going
to Rio that sounds like a fun place to
go walk the streets enjoy some music
some food and oh yeah
you might get bitten by a mosquito in
Brazil too and Brazil there’s a lot
higher risk of mosquito-borne diseases
so you might think well yeah maybe I go
to Brazil and I get sick but that’s
unlikely to have an effect here
but what you got to remember is that
something like Zika can have such
devastating consequences on one side you
see a child with a normal-sized head if
you remember Zika is that virus that can
lead to those devastating health
consequences on the other side you see a
child born with microcephaly one of the
most severe consequences of a Zika
infection and a pregnant woman now I
don’t know about you but going from that
happy excited moment of having your
first child to delivering it and seeing
a baby with this kind of consequence it
would be so devastating I don’t want
that to be anyone I don’t want that to
be one of my three daughters and even
though it seems like these things are a
half a globe away it takes less than 24
hours for any of these diseases to come
into our home area and we already do
have the mosquitoes here that transmit
Zika they’re called ATS a gyp die
they’re one of the most difficult
mosquitoes to control they’re the ones
that when you are out on your patio
you’re slapping at your ankles and they
seem to fly so fast you can’t quite get
them yeah that’s the one and they
transmit a lot of other diseases in Zika
they transmit dengue chikungunya me ro
yellow fever I have a story about
chikungunya a friend of mine in Jamaica
when I visited her she said que si
oh I had chikungunya and she said my
hands hurt so badly I couldn’t open a
doorknob couldn’t open a door knob for
two weeks and it took months before her
arthritis resolved from the disease and
we already have some mosquito-borne
illnesses here we have West Nile virus
West Nile virus killed eight people in
Arizona just last year and things are
changing those may seem like fairly low
numbers
to you and by comparison to a lot of
places in the world they are what you
see here is the global temperatures in
1884 compared to the global temperatures
between a standard of 1951 and 1980 fast
forward to 2016 this is what it looks
like now climate change is happening and
it’s making our planet warmer so what
does that have to do with mosquito-borne
illnesses actually a lot so mosquitoes
habitats are based upon the temperature
conditions that are there so they can go
a little bit more northward and they can
be more so that time frame between egg
and adult gets shorter when the
temperatures are higher and that means
those cycles of mosquito development can
go faster and faster leading to more
mosquitoes in the environment and it’s
not just the mosquito it’s the virus too
so you may think that if you came home
sick from Brazil and you were sitting on
your patio trying to recover and a
mosquito bit you and flew across the
room and bit your daughter that they
might get infected but that’s not how it
works
a mosquito gets the virus and it has to
go through a development stage within
the mosquito before it can transmit to
the next person and guess what that time
that it takes for that virus to develop
gets shorter as temperatures get warmer
exactly so it’s not just increasing
temperatures that’s going to go along
with climate change it’s changes in our
weather patterns increasing extreme
weather events that means hurricanes
like Hurricane Katrina depicted here
that means more droughts and it also
means more severe cold weather like
they’re experiencing on the East Coast
cold weather does not mean
it changes in happening I think it’s
really time that we stop asking people
do you believe in climate change and
so these extreme weather events are
going to do a couple of things first
they’re gonna make people miserable but
second they can destroy the
infrastructure they can make it harder
to get resources to people who need it
they cost a lot of money and the last
thing you need after a devastating
hurricane or other event is for another
disaster to occur a pandemic now the
evidence is sort of equivocal as to
whether or not
hurricanes directly lead to increase
mosquito-borne diseases however when you
damage infrastructure that can take a
long time to rebuild and that damaged
infrastructure can lead to more
vulnerability for people so one of the
things that I think isn’t really
important is to share information for
people to know what’s happening in their
community and how to prevent disease
spread knowledge equals power so how do
we get that knowledge traditionally well
traditionally is you come home from
Brazil maybe you have dengue and you’re
feeling kind of sick some people may
just stay at home they might write it
out at home and never see a medical
professional some people will go to the
doctor and when they go to the doctor
they talk to the doctor tell them their
symptoms and maybe the doctor recognizes
that this might be dengue or chikungunya
or Zika and they go ahead and they get
them a lab test and it gets tested in
the lab and those results get conveyed
to somebody at the Health Department
they process the data and it goes out to
the community that takes a long time it
can take a long time because the Health
Department isn’t going to publish or
make information available on those
cases that are suspect they want to be
sure that there’s something going on so
that means there’s delays and it’s a tip
of an iceberg
because you can see people are getting
lost along this process right because
somebody may just stay home somebody may
go to a doctor who doesn’t know that
dengue could be a possibility so I’ve
been working with public health
researchers because this is a really
well established fact in the public
health community and we’ve been trying
to figure out another way to get
information to people and so we cut out
the doctors the lab and even the Health
Department and we’re asking people to
tell each other directly what’s
happening in their community to tell us
are you sick are you feeling poorly is
there something going on now that
information in and of itself it’s a
little suspect right because people
could have lots of things if they have a
fever but if you see 10 12 15 people in
an area that have this condition that’s
gonna peak public health that’s gonna
have them say okay let’s investigate
let’s see what’s going on and it gives
you direct information at an early time
so that you might be able to take action
and in this we have developed an
application called Katanga it’s kind of
a funny word but it’s actually a swahili
word for chikungunya and in this
application we give you both user
generated data so you can see what’s
happening in and around your zip code
are there people who are sick what do
they have from a syndromic standpoint
right not dengue specifically but
something that might look like dengue
and then we also give you coupled with
that the more certain information the
information that’s coming from the
health department’s that tells you yes
there is a case of dengue there but we
don’t just tell you what’s happening in
the community we tell you what can you
do to stop it we feel that giving people
back information gives them that ability
to take action and do something for
themselves to protect themselves to
protect their family members and so we
tell you a lot of things about
mosquitoes do you know where
all the places are in your home and in
your yard where a mosquito can lay its
eggs and breed did you know that a
mosquito if you go away for three or
four weeks could lay its eggs in your
toilet that’s not a very nice surprise
to come home to a bite like that nobody
another really critical piece of
information that I found in a survey
that we did with Arizona residents that
people really didn’t know is that Zika
is also sexually transmitted the first
mosquito-borne disease to also be
transmitted through that route really
important information for pregnant women
and wanting those that are wanting to
become pregnant so we share all of this
information to empower people to act and
we were really excited because we
launched this right after the Zika
pandemic kind of hit the United States
and people were interested people
downloaded it people used it we were
really excited and then guess what
happened the zika pandemic faded from
the news cycle and so i was kind of
devastated we’d spent all of this time
and energy working on this system and
i’m like oh man have we failed have we
flopped so then we did another survey
here in arizona and we were asking
people when would she be more likely to
actually take action to prevent
mosquito-borne disease and mosquito
bites and they gave me a very revealing
answer they said well i’m more likely to
do it when it’s more likely to affect me
you can see here that as you get closer
and closer to where people live they are
much more likely to say i’m gonna take
action so we want to leverage that we’re
going back to the drawing board we’re
working with communities we’re working
with public health partners and we’re
trying to identify those critical time
points when people really need to give
us their input when we really need you
to tell us if you’re home and you’re
sick when you really need that
critical health information that tells
you when you need to take action in your
home and your community so we may be
approaching some of you and asking you
what do you want us to tell you do you
want us to tell you when mosquitoes are
high when there’s a disease that’s
potentially transmitted by mosquitoes
just down your street or in your zip
code we’re gonna find that out and when
we do we’re going to be able to alert
you so if you have Kidane go on your
phone you might just get a little buzz
and it’ll say hi alert please take
precaution and start telling us if
you’re ill and when that happens when
you’re going outside to enjoy that
beautiful evening you might pick up your
glass in one hand and a can of mosquito repellent in the other thank you