title: Community Participation and Risk Communication for Dengue Prevention and Control in Malaysia
Creators: name: Mohd Royali, Md Sabtuah
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: risk communication
subject: dengue
subject: community participation
subject: Malaysia

description: The acceleration of dengue transmissions, with records indicating a 30-fold increase in reported cases worldwide over the last five decades and an estimated 100 million cases annually, World Health Organization (WHO) classified dengue fever as one of the most important vector-borne diseases. The consequence of uncontrolled Aedes population growth due to urbanization, climate change, poor waste management, and ineffective mosquito control has significantly contributed to the recent surge in Aedes population and dengue cases. Thus, dengue prevention and control has become a global health concern. International organisations and endemic countries have made significant efforts to reduce dengue transmission. New approaches, such as vaccine development and biological strategies, have yet to provide a solution to this problem. The main promising activities are public health efforts in dengue prevention and control such as fogging, larvicide, source reduction, and personal protection (Heintze, Garrido, &amp; Kroeger, 2007; Y. Li &amp; Wu, 2015). All of these efforts necessitate community participation. Studies have shown that community participation (CP) is necessary for dengue prevention and control, particularly through dengue source reduction and personal protection. But, to get and then sustain community commitment throughout dengue eradication programs is challenging. Research consistently shows that risk perception, lack of trust, and insufficient knowledge about the disease were factors leading to low participation, thus to the disease's spread. Thus commitment, collaboration, coordination, communication, and trust are the challenges that must be addressed for the community to participate effectively and consistently. To this end, risk communication (RC) is one of the potential tools to deal with the above-mentioned challenges. RC is an interaction and two-way communication of information, knowledge, opinions and actions concerning risks between stakeholders for behaviour change in managing the risks (ASEAN Secretariat, 2008). RC aims and principles are the elements that facilitate CP in managing challenges in building trust and improving commitment, collaboration, coordination, and communication among those affected by the crisis. WHO has identified RC as a useful strategy to facilitate CP and multi-sector collaboration in dealing with public health crises including the present COVID 19 pandemic. Yet, very little research has been carried out on the use of RC for community mobilization for dengue prevention and control. Research on the combination of CP strategy and RC for dengue programs is much needed to facilitate continuous dengue mitigation activities and to prevent further spread. This is particularly timely for climate affected dengue-prone Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia. Malaysia, a tropical country, has a high Aedes mosquito population, thus dengue prevention and control has become one of the Ministry of Health's top priorities. However, community and related agency participation is very low and continues to be an issue for dengue prevention and control effectiveness and efficiency. It has also become the main reason for uncontrolled dengue transmission and the high Aedes population in Malaysia. However, there has been no dengue research thus far focussing on using RC strategy to facilitate CP. This research aims to fill this gap. [...]