The town of Borbón in northern Ecuador is home to several government and religious offices and a regional hospital. Nonetheless, Ecuador classifies Borbón as rural. That designation implies that Borbón’s residents should be relatively safe from dengue, a disease carried by a species of mosquito that, according to the World Health Organization, “lives in urban habitats and breeds mostly in man-made containers.”
But dengue is spreading across Borbón, where the density of these Aedes aegypti mosquitos can mirror that of urban areas, researchers report in the October Social Science and Medicine. Terms like urban and rural have more to do with politics than public health, says epidemiologist Joseph Eisenberg
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