‘Clean up your rain gutters!’: mosquito control, responsibility, and blame following the 2009–2010 dengue fever outbreak in Key West, Florida

Zoonotic urbanisation: multispecies urbanism and the rescaling of urban epidemiology

“…Given the proclivity of the Aedes vector for domestic interiors, the aerial spraying of whole neighbourhoods can have little long-term effect (WHO, 2022). Furthermore, as the surge of dengue in Florida reveals, the sub-division of neighbourhoods into private lots makes the elimination of breeding opportunities for Aedes mosquitoes all but impossible (Butterworth, 2022).…”

“…Intermittent or poorly coordinated vector control programmes, along with cutbacks in primary health care provision, have made outbreaks more likely. In 2009 dengue made its first appearance in southern Florida since 1946 and has been the focus of on-going control efforts in the face of repeated further outbreaks (Bouri et al, 2012; Butterworth, 2022). 11 And in the cities of the Global South, the scale and severity of dengue outbreaks have been steadily growing: in the case of Dhaka, for example, the Covid-19 pandemic both masked and exacerbated an unprecedented city-wide outbreak of dengue, pushing health care systems to the brink of collapse (Hossain et al, 2022).…”