Blog #3 Brazil Deploys "Junior Firefighters" to Snuff Out Dengue

While reading the recent article, “Brazil Deploys “Junior Firefighters to Snuff out Dengue” it revealed that a new virus had emerged in Brazil. First of all, this new found disease was carried through, the "Aedes aegypti mosquito”. According to the official data released on February 1^st, 2012, there were a total of 2,711 cases of this disease reported. Generally speaking, Dengue is spread through a bite of an infected mosquito, that actually first caught the virus by a biting an infected person. Then the virus last between four to ten days. In addition, early symptoms of dengue include high fever, joint and muscle aches, weakness, shortness of breath, strong headaches and eye socket pain. In addition, one way of handling this disease, is to keep areas rid of the infected mosquito's. As a result, firefighters of the town Rio de Janeiro, are recruiting teenagers to train as junior firefighters to combat the dengue in their local neighborhood.  Also, the “Ten Minutes against Dengue” campaign was created by health authorities as a way to alert people of the Dengue. The campaign was created to eliminate the mosquito's breeding sites, which were mostly found in homes.  At any event the article stressed that if people would just give ten minutes of their own time they could help clear out the diseased mosquito's, and help keep the virus down. Furthermore, health authorities fear that the dengue virus will spread throughout the state. Also they were concerned that some other viruses were re-emerging. Hence with the combination of the new and old virus, the state was very vulnerable and the diseases put the state a high risk for a future epidemic.

Clearly, this is a social problem. If health officials cannot contain these diseases in there state it could eventually cause an epidemic, which would lead to devastating results and even death. Diseases are harmful and can be deadly, and if not properly treated, it could wipe out a whole city. Also, insects travel and carry diseases all over the world, and could easily carry the disease to another country and possibly infect even more people which would in return cause more deaths. In Conclusion, I agree strongly that diseases are not something that we can just stop and eliminate but each country has to help make the world safe and prevent the spread of such infectious diseases. 

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106620