Dynamics of Disease Diffusion: A Critical Analysis of Dengue Outbreak in Kolkata and Adjacent Areas

Abstract

While medical advancement has conquered most infectious diseases in the twenty-first century, the majority of the tropical and sub-tropical develo** countries are still fighting against various vector-borne diseases as an inevitable consequence of the climate change. The predominance of vector-borne diseases in Kolkata has become a continuous threat to human health. Rapid increase of disease incidence, proliferation, and fatality rates among dengue patients creates multi-dimensional effects on the socio-political scenario of urban daily lives. In the last 10 years, the city has experienced a gradual transformation of Dengue Ecology among the city dwellers. Over time, the virus has changed its temporal Disease–Population Dynamics including its transmissibility, rate of replication, infectivity, and virulence. Major Dengue outbreaks in this city exhibit the ineffective surveillance, improper urban environmental planning, vulnerable living status, insufficient political strategies, poor perception quality, and ignorance. High rate of Dengue induced death poses an important question regarding the effectivity of health planning in a metro city like Kolkata. In addition to that, discrepancies in dengue-related reports and data have become associated with disease ecology and the health politics of Kolkata. In this context, an attempt has been made to focus on the Spatio-temporal transformation of the Dengue Virus, to analyze the severity pattern among the patients, to generate dengue-prone area map** based on spatial autocorrelation method, to correlate the spatiality factor of Dengue pockets with local socio-economic conditions, and finally to study the changing Dengue Dynamics in this city from a geographical perspective.