Malaria and dengue fever in Colombia

This week’s IRI feaure

Each year in Colombia, more than 100,000 people get sick from malaria and approximately 42,000 come down with dengue fever. Now, the national government has enlisted IRI’s help in using climate risk management in an ongoing project to improve its early-warning system for the two diseases. The work is overseen by the World Bank and funded by Global Environmental Facility (GEF) and Colombia.”What makes this work fresh and exciting is its approach,” says Walter Baethgen, director of IRI’s Latin America and Caribbean Program. “We have here a project on climate-change adaptation, funded by large and respected global institution, that is looking at ways to reduce a society’s current vulnerabilities to climate as a means of improving its future ability to adapt. This isn’t about projections fifty or hundred years from now, which mean little to people already having to deal with climate risks today.”Colombia spends $15 million annually to try to control malaria and dengue, according to Gilma Mantilla, who, until recently, ran the infectious-disease surveillance program at the Instituto Nacional de Salud (INS). Mantilla says that climate change may have profound impacts on the transmission dynamics of dengue and malaria in the country. [image: James Gathany/CDC]
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