Hesperian Health Guides
Communities Prevent Mosquito Illnesses
HealthWiki > New Where There Is No Doctor > Malaria, Dengue, and Other Illnesses from Mosquitoes > Communities Prevent Mosquito Illnesses
Other ways community leaders can help:
- Improve living conditions: build piped water systems, manage trash and waste water, design community building roofs to prevent pooling of water, and see if latrines or sanitation systems can be improved.
- Make malaria treatment more easily available.
- Distribute bednets and organize events to repair holes and renew treatment of bednets.
- Work together with health authorities for safe community management of any program using insecticides.
Involve everyone in understanding how mosquitoes spread illness, how to avoid bites, and how to stop mosquitoes from breeding. Where are old tires piled up? Discuss who is most affected by mosquitoes in your community and how to prevent bites and mosquito breeding. Are women, men, children, and small babies affected differently? Think about who works or spends time where there are many mosquitoes, for example:
- Places where people fetch water or wash clothes, especially if the water source is still, or spilled water forms puddles or pools
- Farmland or mining sites where holes, pits, or trenches fill with rain
- Inside and around the house, where women and small children spend much of the day, and mosquitoes hide on walls and in the shadows
- Schoolrooms with no screens where children sit still for classes
Cleaning out the mosquitoes!
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 These black spots are larvae that become mosquitoes. We must cover the water tank.
Brigade members became experts on how local mosquitoes breed and how to stop them. |
To fight dengue and other diseases, neighborhood groups in different Latin American countries organized youth and health brigades to go house-to-house and remove places where mosquitoes breed. Participants earn points when they take a photo of places where mosquito eggs or larvae can hide and they take another photo once they have fixed the problem, such as covering a water storage barrel so mosquitoes cannot get in or turning over a bucket so water cannot collect. By adding the photo to a webpage with a community map, everyone can see their progress and where else to visit. They call their webpage DengueChat and they use cell phones to post the images and motivate each other with messages.
Health brigade members take water samples and check for mosquito larvae. They can show the family how to:
- Keep water storage containers covered all the time to prevent egg-laying and new mosquitoes from flying away to bite people.
- Scrub containers once a week to prevent eggs from hatching.