El dengue, ¿un problema para quién?

AE CARBAJO; OCAMPO, CAROLINA; BLOIS, PAULA

Scripta Ethnologica

Centro Argentino de Etnología Americana, CONICET

Lugar: Buenos Aires; Año: 2020 vol. 42 p. 65 - 96

1669-0990

Summary:Dengue is a recurrent public health problem thataffects the American continent. Recent records indicate a historicalraise innumber of cases in South America, particularly, in Brazil, Paraguay andBolivia. Correspondingly, in Argentina, outbreaks have occurred almost allyears except 2001 and 2005 since 1998. Furthermore, in 2009, 2016 and 2020 theepidemics reachedal most  half of thecountry. Therefore, dengue appears to be configured as a disease that cannot beprevented or controlled. As a consequence, our initial aim is to find andexamine the meanings about the dengue problem that circulate among healthagents and neighbors in a locality in the province of Buenos Aires. Weconducted in-depth interviews to health local agents of different status in twohealth centers and participant observations in local trainings to agentsbetween December and February 2019. According to our findings dengue does notseem to be a problem for the neighbors nor for some of the interviewed healthagents. Mosquito bitings and some health problems are the subjects of concern.The preventive measures associated with container treatment are limitted by themultiple meanings and uses that people give to containers. Furthermore, we findthat fumigations have many meanings. They appear as the only possible solutionand, on the contrary, as a tool of political legitimacy. Similarly, theliability problem is discussed in the interviews with the health workers. Ingeneral, we can say that this study supports what isstated in other researchesregarding the presence of fractures between the ideals of locality programs andthe people?s daily life.Keywords: Qualitative Analysis, Dengue, prevention,Health personnel