Derek Cummings and colleagues have published a landmark paper in understanding Dengue transmission in Science last week, revealing that most Dengue infections are transmitted in and around the home. Outbreaks of the dengue virus appear to be largely driven by infections centered in and around the home, with the majority of cases related to one another occurring in people who live less than 200 meters apart, suggests new research conducted by the University of Florida, the Institut Pasteur, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, the Ministry of Public Health of Thailand, the Queen Sirikit National Institute of Child Health and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The findings, published in the March 24 issue of Science, offer new insights into the spread of dengue — which infects more than 300 million people each year — and other flaviviruses such as zika and yellow fever, and how governments and individuals might put in place more targeted and more effective mosquito control programs.
For their study, the researchers genetically sequenced the viruses of 640 dengue infections that occurred between 1994 and 2010 in both densely-populated Bangkok, Thailand and less densely populated regions outside the capital, then overlaid this information on a map showing where the people infected with the virus lived. Their results show that in people living fewer than 200 meters apart (typically in houses in the same neighborhood), 60 percent of dengue cases come from the same transmission chain, meaning they were infected by a virus that was only recently introduced into the area. In people who were separated by one to five kilometers, just three percent of cases came from the same transmission chain.
Read the original paper here: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6331/1302