Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Dengue fever (DF) is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans with 50-100 million cases annually worldwide, and its prevalence is being aggravated by trends of climate change, urbanization and poverty. Increasingly, DF control efforts are focusing on the links between humans and their biophysical, social and economic environments while incorporating community involvement and interdisciplinarity in interventions. The effectiveness of such approaches in linking involved disciplines and stakeholder bodies (researchers, policy and decision-makers, communities, individuals) remains unexamined. To evaluate how well evidence is being applied to implement actions and policy to improve people's health, I will apply a four-dimensional Knowledge Translation (KT) model and the Mayan Index (MI), a a tool for measuring DF transmission risk that combines hygiene (refuse management) and mosquito breeding risk (water management) indices, to assess DF transmission risk at the community level. MI scores will be used to initiate and evaluate participatory community interventions based on improved community-level and domestic water and refuse management. Following this data (pre and post-intervention MI scores, impact of intervention(s) on DF transmission risk) through the public health decision-making process will illuminate strengths and weaknesses in KT at the community, local and regional scales. I will use lessons learned from interdisciplinary dengue management projects in Cuba and Ecuador and apply these to the dengue crisis in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Although dengue interventions have been numerous in both Latin America and South East Asia, very rarely do they exchange successful lessons in either field work or policy initiatives. This project will establish an international community of practice (Canada, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Cuba) in DF and water management and new "East-West" (Bangladesh/Latin America) partnerships within that community of practice.