Bangladeshi women susceptible to mosquito-borne diseases: study

Women in Bangladesh are more likely to become infected by diseases like chikungunya, dengue and zika, suggests a new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Institut Pasteur in Paris and icddr,b.

This is because the mosquitoes that transmit such diseases remain in and around the household and women in Bangladesh spend 66 percent of their time during the day at home while men spend 45 percent at home, it says.

For the study, researchers investigated a 2012 chikungunya outbreak in Palpara, a village 60 miles outside the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, according to a statement by the icddr,b.  

Symptoms of chikunguniya include rash or joint pain, fever, headache and backache. And it is transmitted by daytime biting aedes aegypti mosquito, which also spreads other diseases like dengue and zika.

The findings were published on November 7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offer key insights into how health officials can combat other diseases that spread the same way, including zika.

The findings are important for Bangladesh as dengue cases reported in the country are more than 5000, which is higher than that reported since 2003.

The researchers interviewed 1,933 individuals from each of 460 households of the village. A total of 364 people (18 percent) reported having symptoms consistent with chikungunya between May 29 and December 1, 2012.

The research found that more than a quarter of human infections spread within the same household and that half of infections occurred in households less than 200 meters away.

“We had good reason to suspect that women in Bangladesh spend a lot more time at home than men” Emily Gurley, co-senior author and director of the emerging pathogens program at icddr,b says.

“However, this study allowed us to quantify exactly how big this difference is and to demonstrate how this could be responsible for increased risk of infection by some mosquito-borne pathogens.

Outbreaks of viruses such as dengue and zika that are spread by the same mosquito as chikungunya are likely to disproportionately affect women in such communities, too”.

Overall, the researchers found that women in Palpara were 1.5 times more likely to develop chikungunya than men. The researchers also found that coils designed to repel mosquitoes did not work to prevent transmission in this region.