©AP Photo/The Brownsville Herald, Brad Doherty
DCL
Dengue could be next on the list of public health scares in the U.S., part of a trend that many blame largely on global warming. Mexico is already experiencing epidemics of Dengue: enter the Border Infectious Disease Surveillance Project, or BIDS, which aims to prevent that and other infectious diseases from spreading.
Dengue is so easily transmitted that public health officials are worried about it crossing over the border and spreading, with even just one case. With climate change increasing temperatures and making it easier for mosquitoes to survive and transmit disease in areas that may have been too cold for them before, and with doctors in the U.S. not trained to look for, or treat, Dengue, the concern is justified.
So BIDS is a joint effort by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Mexican Secretariat of Health designed to monitor and contain infectious diseases in the region. They're using surveillance techniques and laboratory testing to monitor the disease closely.
This sort of team-based, comprehensive approach to tackling infectious disease and maintaining public health is becoming increasingly popular. The new National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network is a new initiative under the CDC to compile data from local to national sources. Howard Frumkin, director of the CDC's National Center for Environmental Health, recognizes that climate change is "a significant global health challenge," and part of confronting that challenge is understanding what specific changes to the climate we should expect, and how those will affect the spread of disease around the world. The idea is to collect as much information about a region, its weather patterns, and public health issues as possible: including from satellite images that can help to predict where epidemics might be likely to break out.
ed before the disease has a chance to hit—saving lives not only locally, but preventing the spread of diseaWe all know that prevention is better than treatment (well, except for people leading the health care debate), and if this kind of planning can successfully predict likely outbreaks, interventions can be implemented before the disease has a chance to hit—saving lives not only locally, but preventing the spread of disease in a world much more equipped to enable it than we've ever been prepared for in the past.
