clarifying incidence of Dengue in Chiapas

I've been meaning to write this for over a week. Can't keep ignoring this blog! Thankful that Touro has decided I can use this blog to satisfy some of my requirements for this field study.

Last week, I thought was hearing mixed messages about how bad Dengue is this year. Clearly, it's bad -- many more cases are falling into the serious categories of Dengue Grave ("Serious Dengue" - likely lethal) or Dengue con Signos de Alarmo ("Dengue with alarm signs" - when abdominal pain and vomiting appear with transaminitis from liver inflammation, low platelets - responsible for the potential hemorrhagic/bleeding component of the disease, high hematocrit, third-spacing with fluid in the abdomen or lungs, in addition to the regular awfulness of the least serious classification Dengue no Grave or "non-serious Dengue").

So in my work in the community and hospitals, I've heard the number of cases is much higher this year than last year. Yet, last week when I did the literature search and compiled some information from the Secretaria de Salud's Panorama Epidmiologia de Dengue, I thought it showed the opposite:

As you can see, at the time I compiled this table, it was week 25 of 2018 for tracking the Epidemiology of Dengue in Mexico, which the Mexican government takes very seriously. This is why there are doctors like Dra. Romero at Hospital General de Tapachula whose focus is to track the cases of Dengue and other infectious diseases (e.g. Tuberculosis). But, I was perplexed to see the incidence of Dengue appearing far, far lower this year, even in Chiapas... However, it was my mistake. The 778 should have also been in the far right column under 2018, and that would have shown me that there is nearly double the incidence of confirmed cases of Dengue in Chiapas so far.

I caught this error while checking up on week 26 this morning, which now shows a clear increase in the incidence of Dengue within Chiapas this year:

From week 25 to week 26, the % increase in annual incidence up to that week between 2017 and 2018 has increased from 92% to 93%. The Dengue season has started earlier this year, the cases are more severe, and the children are affected most. Below, the graph to the right shows a much higher prevalence of more serious cases of Dengue among children aged 5-9 years old:

Panorama Epidemiológico de Dengue 2018, Publicación Actual (05 julio 2018), Semana Epidemiológica 26

This unfortunate view of the problem helps to highlight the serious nature of this disease for the people of Chiapas. It provides motivation to me to do what I can to contribute to the success of the project to use Sterile Insect Technique to reduce the population of mosquito vectors in this area. I hope to further clarify the situation using local/regional data soon.