Mary Hayden - Roles of Climate Variability and Human-Environmental Interactions
on the potential for dengue fever transmission.
Mary Hayden has been working for the past 5 years as project director and co-principal investigator of a NOAA funded study investigating the roles of climate variability and human-environmental interactions on the potential for dengue fever to emerge along the US/Mexico border in Arizona and Sonora, MX. In collaboration with the University of Colorado at Denver, ISSE, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Arizona Department of Health Services, Arizona Office of Border Health, and the Oficina de la Salud Publica in Nogales, Sonora, she is researching the distribution of the tropical mosquito vector for dengue fever, Aedes aegypti, in a desert climate.
Mary downloading data from a HOBO data logger (hourly Tmin, Tmax, RH)
Mary has recently completed a field investigation in Puerto Rico through additional funding from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene's Gorgas Memorial Institute. This study, in collaboration with CDC's Dengue Branch, investigated factors involved in dry season transmission of dengue fever in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In many regions, epidemic dengue transmission is seasonal in response to variability in temperature and rainfall. Although the relative influence of climatic factors is not well understood, in many tropical and subtropical regions there is typically an ebb during the dry season, and greater rates of transmission are seen during the rainy season. The study investigated two adjacent neighborhoods, one with high, and the other with low dengue persistence and incidence in an urban area in Puerto Rico during the dry season, March and April 2007, to test the hypothesis that the presence of permanent bodies of water (e.g. septic tanks, large water storage tanks, wells) sustains Aedes aegypti productivity and dengue transmission. Evaluation of immature mosquitoes through pupal surveys, adult captures for viral detection, and differing ecological and social factors was undertaken to explain differences between the two communities.
ASP Spotlight September 2007
For more ASP spotlights click here http://www.asp.ucar.edu/spotlight/archive.jsp