The social territories of dengue

Since Kimura and Hotta isolated its causal agent in 1943, the research and study of dengue have been developed under the mechanical perspective of the positivist and neopositivist paradigms, which privilege the biomedical conception of the disease (mainly constituted by elements of a biological nature), and test epidemiological explanations based on the construction of linear relationships between its components. However, the extensive scientific knowledge achieved by biomedical sciences and public health, and the indisputable technical and technological advances produced by

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This way of understanding dengue has not translated into a constant and progressive decrease in its epidemiological burden. Perhaps an explanation for this inconsistency can be found in the reflection of the Brazilian researcher Milton Santos, who maintains that the heterogeneity of the social, economic, political and cultural structures of a human population modulates the paths and emphases with which the disease is distributed. This allows us to understand the differential patterns of exposure and vulnerability between groups and social subjects. Thus, the appearance of the disease is not a fact due to random factors, but rather the

result of an intricate process in which the contexts of poverty, as limitations of the structural and functional logic of the population that suffers from them, play a substantial role in the pattern of infection occurrence. In Latin America, populations with urban and peri-urban expressions associated with precarious housing conditions, poor network water supply, overcrowding, low educational levels, poor sanitary conditions and unstable insertion in the productive system, combine determinants of vulnerability to dengue that should not be ignored.