Dengue finds its voice

Image courtesy of the IFRC

A few days before World Health Day, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) launched a new advocacy strategy and paper: Dengue: Turning up the volume on a silent disaster. We spoke to Amanda McClelland, Emergency Health Senior Officer at the IFRC, about the strategy, the publication and, of course, about how World Health Day helped with the campaign. “The advocacy was driven from the field where we were seeing the dengue burden increasing,” Amanda revealed. “The cost of dengue is high. People in the villages get dengue regularly, meaning they lose wages but have to spend money on treatment.” The IFRC has seen carrier mosquitos reaching some parts of Europe and returning to the United States and Australia, but dengue really grabbed the federation’s attention after a large-scale five-country outbreak in the Americas last year.

Image courtesy of the IFRC

The focus of World Health Day 2014 was on raising awareness of vector-borne diseases such as dengue and leishmaniasis. With the slogan “Small bite, big threat,” the World Health Organization’s campaign provided insight into the diseases, their vectors, and the steps we need to take to protect ourselves and our families.

The campaign confirmed that dengue is the fastest growing vector-borne disease today. 50 years ago it was only found in nine countries; today it can be found in 100. Already over 40 percent of the world’s population is at risk.

Image courtesy of the IFRC

The IFRC has already seen World Health Day as having a significant impact on dengue with more people talking to them about it. Amanda told us: “World Health Day has really amplified our message. We’re really pleased about the number of people that are interested in talking to us about dengue now.”

Image courtesy of the IFRC

A number of the federation’s 189 National Societies across the world used the day to launch their dengue programs. The national Society in Timor-Leste, for example, ran a cleanup day where they mobilized hundreds of volunteers and community members to do environmental sanitation projects. In addition, they also had meetings with the WHO and the Ministry of Health to look at what they can be doing about dengue in their country today and how they can move things forward in the future. Besides this, volunteers also have a key role to play as they assist communities in adopting the necessary behavior change, which impacts the transmission of the disease; they are also the link between local health facilities as they aid in data collection.

Volunteers reaching out to locals. Image courtesy of the IFRC

The IFRC is confident it will see similar programs from other National Societies. “We’re advocating for our National Societies to sit with partners in their countries and look at what they are doing now, how they could improve and how they need to move forward,” shared Amanda. At Break Dengue, we anticipate many more conversations derived from World Health Day 2014 and the IFRC advocacy, conversations that will help us all understand how big the problem really is and how big an impact it is really having… conversations that will see governments, partners, health workers, communities, and donors working together to combat this easily preventable – yet extremely painful, costly and disruptive – disease. From the interest that’s already been generated, we know great things can happen.