 Welcome everybody to today's webinar, which is called Chasing the Mosquitoes in the Urban South, Aidas, Egypti, Water and Households. My name is Leneke Knoep. I'm from the Water Channel and this webinar is part of the webinar series IHE Delft Online Seminars for Alumni and Partners in Cooperation with the Water Channel. So a very special welcome to all IHE alumni and partners. And before handing over to the speaker of today, I would like to mention a few things regarding logistics. So this is an interactive webinar and you can see in the bottom right corner a chat panel and this chat panel can be used to ask questions to the speaker. We will compile them throughout the whole presentation and afterwards we will post them one by one. Secondly, I would also like to ask you if you can write in this chat book your name, your expertise and your organization. So we have an idea of who is here in the webinar room. And the webinar and the presentation and references, et cetera will all be shared also at thewaterchannel.tv later on. So our speaker today is Dr. Tatjana Acevedo. She is a geographer with a background in political studies and she holds the position at IHE Delft of lecturer and researcher in politics of sanitation and wastewater governance. Currently, she carries out research to the mosquito called Aidas, Egypti in urban areas in Mozambique and in Colombia. And this mosquito is the one that can transfer diseases like dengue, zika and shikungunya, which we read about in the news frequently. Now, in this webinar, Tatjana will explain how mosquitoes transfer these diseases and also what prevention measures can be taken. She will show the approach of the research, which is a bit different than the conventional research. She shows the comparative cases focusing on households and she will explain how water supply availability, politics, community strategies to store water and much more will have impact on the presence of this mosquito. And with this, I would like to show you just a one minute clip of this most dangerous animal in the air for you to get an idea of what is actually what we're going to discuss about. And after that, I'd be very happy to hand over to Tatjana. Good morning. So my name is Tatjana Acevedo Guerrero. I work here at IHE Delft and I'm going to be talking today about water and households and mosquitoes and about how we can learn more than about the mosquito, about the relationship between communities and mosquitoes in the urban south. In 2014 and 2015, various outbreaks of dengue were reported in Mozambique. In countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Colombia, there have also been outbreaks of dengue, Sica and Chikungunya. Now, high percentages of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that most effectively transmits these diseases, were found in cities such as Pemba in the north of Mozambique, Aputo is capital in the south, Barranquilla, the Caribbean city in Colombia, and Buenaventura in the south east west of the city. Now, dengue, Sica and Chikungunya and their transmission vector, Mosquito Aedes aegypti, are tied to water as this mosquito lays eggs in stored water in or around households. It's important to mention that after they breed, these mosquitoes do not always parade through the city, like other mosquitoes, like for example, Anopheles, the one that transmits malaria, but they hide inside households behind doors and corners. This is a daytime feeder mosquito. Now, it is important to mention that besides being tied to water, Aedes aegypti are also tied to climate change. Why? Because studies have warned of the possibility that climate change might increase the likelihood of diseases spread by insects in new areas, as temperature can affect the distribution of the mosquito, and the effectiveness of the virus transmission and also rainfall can increase surface water, which would provide breeding sites for more and more mosquitoes. Now, the pattern of dengue's spread has changed through the years, as the mosquito, as the Aedes aegypti, has adapted to new processes of economic, political and social change. Now, one of the main characteristics of Aedes aegypti is that it stays close to humans. Like the flying pattern of Aedes aegypti is not very, like it cannot be very long, so they need to stay close to humans. And so they have adapted their biting periods to those of human activities. Now, female mosquitoes can develop and lay eggs in aquatic habitats, easily found in cities. So as the world has been urbanizing, the mosquito has been urbanizing too. Pagnant or stored water, buckets, tanks, drums, cisterns, flower vases, pools, tires, and other human-made containers provide the needed cultivation habitat, where larvae will develop shortly into adult versions of the mosquito. Now, this project that I have been thinking about in recent years uses an ethnographic approach to study households, water supply availability, intermittence, the fact that water comes and goes without a pattern many times, and distribution, and document politics and everyday communities' strategies to obtain and store water. It focuses on the interdependence between intermittent water supply, that is water that will be available throughout some hours of the day, but then will be cut, the efficient solid waste collection, and the IRS Egypty. It also takes into account the different legacies left by civil wars and rural crisis and processes of unequal urbanization. In doing so, what I have wanted to do is to engage with multiple actors, local and national regulators and state officials, water services providers, non-governmental organizations, and, of course, the different communities in the city's neighborhoods. Now, it is important to mention, because I received some emails of the participants in the webinar today, that my focus is not on the mosquito per se, like the biological characteristics of the mosquito, and it is not on, like, epidemiological and statistical factors or models surveying, like, the flights of the mosquito and biting periods, like, in incidents of dengue or the disease itself. Like, this research is more concerned on the relationship, on this dance between communities and mosquitoes, because mosquitoes are there and have been there for many years, so it's this choreographies of biting, of flying, and of people being used to this, and of people of who is getting sick and why. How is this disease affecting cities? Is it affecting everyone the same way? And why? Which are the historical factors that will explain that? Now, since there is no vaccine for dengue, no available vaccine, the only way to reduce transmission has been to control mosquitoes' breeding sites. So this research will ensure that the realities of dengue in cities are taken into account in national policies. The aim is to produce a specific knowledge on the connection between water supply and dengue, between sanitation and dengue, between drainage and dengue, and also analyze the distinct reasons for water storage practices. If there's water that is being stored in the city, to ask ourselves why? And why is it being stored in or around living areas? So what to inform and document policies and practices, not only in what concerns the government treatment of dengue outbreaks or Chikungunya outbreaks or Sika outbreaks, but also regarding water reforms and water supply providers to tell providers and also regulators, hey dengue and Sika and Chikungunya, it is a problem of water. It is a problem of intermittent water supply. In this way the project will contribute or it aims to contribute in coordination with local and international partners to the development of new strategies to fight dengue, which will potentially contribute to the development of new models for water management, especially of the distribution of water and sanitation services in the city. Now again, there are, of course, development outcomes. If you're going to study dengue, some scholars say you need not just to study it, but also to be able to be like pragmatic and talk about what can work or what cannot work, what is perhaps fair to these communities, what they will be more prone to accept or to follow. So firstly, we will try to communicate our findings with people that design policies to fight dengue in cities so that it can be more tailored to the context. All gathered information will contribute to changing public health approaches perhaps to dengue. So like a basic measure that is taken in many cities, which is, for example, giving out nets so that people will sleep with these nets throughout the night. It's just, for example, which is the particularity of dengue is that it bites in the morning, so perhaps the net won't be such a good measure. Secondly, inhabitants will receive improved public health regardless of their gender, age, and socioeconomic class. So it's also this idea to work in the communities to learn what is going on there before intervening. And finally, make this bridge between public health and the realities of dengue and water service providers because it's not a clear link that we do these days. Usually they do not, like they are not invited to the discussion on these epidemics, although they have a lot to do with it. I would like to make this also more interesting and fun, I hope, to talk about the study cases and of the examples of what we are trying to do because that will make all the texts that I have just read way more interesting and useful. So the Barranquilla case, I would like to start with an anecdote. I was invited, when I first arrived, to do fieldwork in Barranquilla to a barbecue in one of the gated communities in the cities, northern neighborhoods, which are mainly inhabited by, this one at least, was mainly inhabited by upper middle class, young couples. And as many gated communities in the urban sunny regions of Colombia, these had apartment buildings. But also it had something that some people called the pool area or the spa area, which has usually a pool, a sauna, a jacuzzi. And of course, these areas always have a set of showers and of toilets for people to change and shower before and after swimming in the pool. So the barbecue was in this area. And everyone was talking, but suddenly the conversation was silent as to Afro-Colombian women who were working as domestic workers because they had a uniform of domestic workers in one of the buildings. They crossed the pool heading towards the showers area. And there was some anxiety among the group of barbecue goers because they thought that perhaps the domestic workers were using the sauna or the jacuzzi. Like there was this out of place anxiety. Until one of the women that was attending the barbecue, she explained that what was going on is that domestic workers would make use of the showers in the spa area to shower before going home after usually their work. They goes from 6 in the morning or 7 in the morning until 6 or 7 in the afternoon. So before going home, they would shower because they explained there was certain intermittence in water services in the areas where these domestic workers worked. So they took advantage of the showers to shower. They discussed that they would talk about this in a formal meeting of homeowners of the building and that they would try to forbid mates from entering the showers, the spa area. Now, this anecdote is very telling both of the inequality situation in Barranquilla, which is the biggest city of the Colombian Caribbean. So the class inequalities, also like historical racial inequalities. But it also talks about the situation that was being experienced in the city in what concerned the distribution of water, of good water services. Now, throughout my field work in Barranquilla, whether I could witness, was where a lot of discussions about water, about the very high tariffs of water, about the frequent and expected costs in water services. But also, people were discussing other issues that had to do with water, such as rain. So there were problems with drainage. Every time it rained in the rainy period, which goes from June to December, they would witness frequent flash flooding. And this had to do also with the problem with solid waste management. But they were also discussing the fact that this flash flooding would affect electricity infrastructure, which would already be not well maintained. And this would cause power outbreaks. So they were discussing the water service, which was not very good quality, but also expensive. They were discussing flash flooding. They called this arroyos, which was affecting normal life, routines, and traffic. But they were also discussing power cuts. Now, every time there were power cuts, electricity cuts, due to flash flooding, communities would also sometimes witness water cuts. Because Barranquilla is a very sloppy city with a topography that will require pumping stations to pump water. So if there's no electricity in some of these pumping stations, they would also experience a power out of this. So I began this quest on Barranquilla and its water distributions by focusing on history. So I first analyzed the World Bank Project that was made in 1985 and that failed. And it was a World Bank Project that aimed to improve water drainage and sanitation infrastructure, especially in lower income neighborhoods in Barranquilla. It failed not only because of political party like corruption and different ideas of the city they wanted, do they want to include the lower income areas or do they want them to go to other cities? But also because of things that were not, but that couldn't be foreseen. So for example, due to the Colombian civil conflict, armed conflict, there were big, like, rural urban migrations throughout the start of the 1990s and the early 2000s. So for those of you that perhaps don't know, the Colombian armed conflict lasted for two decades and it involved left-wing guerrillas, armies, and also paramilitary armies. And especially these paramilitary armies had the technique of doing massacres in rural communities and throughout the war. Barranquilla received a lot of displaced communities. Rural communities that were displaced in the midst of the war and that had to, like, escape from their rural lands or the places where they lived. And go to Barranquilla with not much to start all over. So if you take a look at this graphic, for example, in the year 2000, for example, Barranquilla received 16,612 people. And these displaced communities mainly went to the south of the city, to the low-income areas of the city. Now I have here also the genicoefficient. Now the genicoefficient is a measure of statistical dispersion and it represents income and wealth distribution. So if you have one that is absolute inequality, like wealth is concentrated in one person. And if you have zero, that means that there's a horizontal distribution of income. So you can see that these are under year 2000 where when the genicoefficient starts being 0,5, which is like the inequality becomes higher between people in Barranquilla that are wealthy and communities that have very, very low incomes, that are experiencing poverty, that are experiencing the lack of formal jobs, and, yeah, of course, lack of infrastructure, housing, of education, of health. Not only the war caused migration, rural-rural migrations, but also, like, we had droughts and flooding in rural areas that were where infrastructure was already, in many cases, shattered by the war and by lack of investment. So what I started seeing a lot in Barranquilla throughout my fieldwork was that a lot of water cuts in the south, which was this area, especially the southwest, which was a low-income area that was experiencing the arrival, massive arrival, of these new communities, they were experiencing water cuts that were unexpected. And these water cuts, many times, were caused because of power outages, because there were power outages in the pumping stations. So what I started seeing was a lot of practices of water storage, just in case water would start. And just in case water would be cut. And what I also witnessed was that a lot of people started getting sick. So there had been dengue for a while in Barranquilla and in Colombia in general. But throughout, for example, 2014, a lot of people were becoming sick of chikungunya, which was a disease that was transmitted by the same mosquito, but that was like a little bit different, and the name was funny. There were songs about it. People would only try to deal with it with acetaminophen, with pain killers, ibuprofen, and life would go on. And I started realizing also that it was mainly women in the sector that stayed home and had to lose one day of work because of this chikungunya disease. And by 2015, things got a little bit more complicated because then there was a new disease emerging in the southwest of Barranquilla, which was Zika. Now, the spread of Zika in Colombia was really, really fast. So in 2015, there were 341 cases of Zika. And in less than a year, the cases were 99,721. So the disease causes discomfort, fever, ratchets, and conjunctivitis. But it has a peculiarity, and it is that it can be transmitted prenatally. There were lots of worries because of the case of some mothers that transmitted the virus prenatally in Rio, in Brazil. So the state started being more and more worried, and there were more campaigns to deal with the disease. Now, it is important to mention that also according to Colombian statistics, women were more vulnerable to the disease because for every two-thirds of reported cases of Zika in Colombia were diagnosed in women. Now, some scholars have pointed out the fact that women are the ones that in Colombia sometimes stay home in the morning to cook or to take care of the water storage, and that can make them more vulnerable to the biting of the mosquito because as we discussed at the beginning, this mosquito bites in the morning. It is a daytime feeder. What I want to point out here, and with this quote, is that many of the measures to stop dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya were targeting communities and telling them, hey, you cannot store more water, and if so, you need to cover the tanks of the liquid, change the water. So there was a policing of communities by telling them you need to stop storing water, and many times these communities, which were already doing two or three jobs in the informal market, would not stop storing water because it was necessary due to the unexpected costs and also did not have perhaps time, and when being blamed for the spread of the disease, the answer they had was sometimes to not let the health brigades come in or to think that they would still continue doing the same things they were doing because they didn't have time to change their water storage practices and invest in closed tanks. Also another measure of the government was to ask women to avoid pregnancy, to delay pregnancy throughout a period of time, which was also lived with a lot of anxiety in the community because it implied first that women can decide alone over when to get pregnant, and secondly that women have access to contraceptive measures, and it put a lot of the blame in the women because if the government is asking you, do not store water and do not get pregnant, and you have to continue storing water and you do get pregnant perhaps, then it is a double blame because we told you so. Now, this was the original seed of this inquiry of thinking, how is this disease lived in the neighborhoods, in the barrios, and who is being affected by it, and who is being blamed of it, and how this disease crystallizes only in some conditions of inequality, in some conditions of intermittent water supply. So with that inquiry, with that doubt, I thought that perhaps we should do comparative work between cities that have had to struggle with the same problems, with the same mosquitoes, and to see what the cities had in common and also what the cities could talk to, like how they could discuss and have the dialogue to see if their experiences could help the others. So with this in mind, we started a project, and this was thankfully not me alone, but this is a project with a lot of amazing women. So Professor Sandra Manuel in Mozambique, we are a big team of interdisciplinary researchers. We started trying to understand the way dengue crystallized into cities of Mozambique. Now, the first city we started, which is the city where also the outbreak was stronger, was Pemba. Now, it's important to say that dengue had been inactive in Mozambique for 30 years. Now there are new outbreaks, there were new outbreaks, and there were also little outbreaks of chikungunya. So what was explained in this? So the first thing that I want to say in the Mozambique case, which is a research that is not over, it's on its way, is that at the beginning when we arrived and having the experience that we had in Colombia, we thought that perhaps we were going to find the same pattern of women being more prone to getting sick. But what we found is that women were not the ones staying home in the context of Pemba, of low income neighborhoods in Pemba. What we found was that there were lots of young men staying home watching TV or playing with their smartphones, because these young men had no formal jobs and they would have cash paying jobs during the tourist season, or not a scholarized young man. They would hang out in their homes and wait for the tourist season to work. And elderly women we found in the homes. So what we found perhaps is that here, the pattern of transmission was a little bit different. Young and adult women were out working, and we found mostly young men. Pemba also, it's important to say, it's a city that depends on tourism and on mining. So throughout the years, it has received lots of also rural to urban migrations. Another thing that we found that it's important is that taking into account that the feedback, the enterprise of water, there are water costs that are very daily water costs, daily water rationing in these low income neighborhoods. So they built cement tanks that go, that are done in different shapes and in different sizes. Now families in low income areas that will have more funds will build these rectangular tanks, where they will be able to store more water. And they will later become suppliers selling water where shortages are really bad. And they will sometimes treat this water with chlorine. But yeah, families with lower incomes will have smaller tanks, or will just store water around their houses in different places. Another very important thing, sometimes we think, oh, why do families have tires, car tires, truck tires? And there's this big fight with the community to tell them to throw them away. Firstly, and I had seen also that in Barranquilla, sometimes solid waste management is a problem, so communities wouldn't know what to do with their solid waste. And secondly, in the case of Pemba, we found that they use these tires. So the inner part of the tire is removed and it's put into strips. And these strips are used in construction because they put them with bamboo. And with that, they leave the walls that are often coated with cement or clay. That is because other materials such as concrete or stones or adobe are more expensive. And these communities are also migrating from the rural areas to the urban areas in search for job opportunities due to the mining boom or the tourism boom. So after they do that, they remove the inner part. These tires are left in the patios so that kids can play with them. And sometimes they are used also to lock doors so that thieves won't be able to come in the night because they will make noise. And these tires, of course, are the Hilton Hotel for mosquitoes for Aedes aegypti. Because Aedes aegypti also we have found through the work of some of the researchers, they like water at some temperature. They need the water to be at some temperature. So if the water is being a little bit warmer, then you will get more and more mosquitoes. Another researcher did her work in Maputo. And what she found is that there was like a difference in the way that storage happened because while families that had more funds, everyone experiences intermittency. But while some people experiences intermittency and can invest in big tanks that are located in the roofs, so they will be, first, these tanks will be closed, will be far, so they will be less prone to getting, yeah, to having contact with the mosquito. Some other families will have less resources to invest, to make the first investment in these big tanks and will end up storing water in like in different smaller containers. And these containers will be stored inside or outside and these containers will be more prone to harvesting mosquitoes. Or to being a possible habitat of the mosquito. One of the things that it's out there but we haven't been able to fully explore because as I said, this is a project that it's ongoing is the relationship between drainage and solid waste. Solid waste is also a condition of possibility. If there weren't solid waste problems, it would be harder for this mosquito to thrive as she does in low-income areas where any container acts as a habitat for them. But this is a thing that we have not yet tackled also which are the habits of the communities in regards to solid waste. Another thing and with this I want to close and this is the aim of the project in the long run is also to see which are the civilities between Colombia and Mozambique in terms of... So Mozambique also went through a civil war from 77 to 92. It was also a big deadly war that had like I think about one million victims between the war and the famines that war cost. And there was a destruction of much of the rural infrastructure. So hospitals, rail lines, roads, schools that child soldier phenomena which is also what we had in Colombia, land, mine. So that after that, like the targeting of rural populations has been systematic in both Colombia and Mozambique. And there are parts of migration from the rural areas that are devastated from the war to cities. And so we have two things that we see in common which is one, rural poverty and two, big inequality because throughout the war in both Colombia and Mozambique not only people became impoverished but also there were some people that became like that became wealthy. So we see big genicoeficients in both countries. Big, deep inequalities not only between the rural and the urban but we see in the urban areas. And I think and we have been discussing how these inequalities are conditioned for the mosquito to thrive. The fact that there is water but this water is being distributed only in some areas that there is good water but only for some and that there's density but the density is not the sole condition of possibility. It's a density where there's some people that are very poor and some people that are wealthy enough or very wealthy. So with this we have also been doing archival work to understand a little bit the history of Mozambique and with this I would like to end. I want to thank you. I want to remind you that this Mozambique part of the research has been a group endeavor and that I have my colleague Sandra Manuel in the University, Eduardo Montliani, Margarida Paolo and like the team of students, Angela Guayona and two amazing Mozambican anthropologists that have been doing the work mostly in Pemba, Danicia and Amanda. So now I would like to open the floor for questions and comments and ideas. Thank you very much Tatjana for your presentation and for all the insights and this very necessary topic. That's something that I would definitely conclude. And we have a few questions and some of them are a bit related to each other. So I would like to ask you the first question that I have put up here on the left side. So the first question is from somebody from India and he asks, in India there were no dengue outbreaks before 2006 and in 2006 it suddenly appeared and since then it is the biggest public health issue every year. So do you know what might have been the reason for the sudden appearance of you from your knowledge? Thank you. Thank you for the participant from India. I think it's something that also we witnessed in Mozambique. So in Mozambique the epidemic was, they weren't any epidemics registered in 30 years and all of a sudden in 2014 there was an epidemic. So we work also closely with Dr. Paula Vilo from the INS from the Institute of National Health of Mozambique and she told us that when she first went to Pemba from Maputo she took two sets of clothes because she thought it was going to be easy. Like she was going to go there and see another epidemic of malaria and then go back home. She's the head of the epidemiology lab. But when she stayed, when she arrived there she ended up staying I think for two months because she realized this is not a malaria epidemic. This is dengue and for her it was a big surprise and for communities too. I think the causes that interest me the most are the social causes that can, of course, the mosquito evolves with the communities. So the mosquito adapts to new social and economic challenges that perhaps can favor their breeding. Their breeding. So there are some scholars that say that with urbanization perhaps we will see more cases of Ayers-Agypti instead of other mosquitos such as the malaria mosquito because this is a mosquito that thrives in urbanization or in unequal urbanization. The fact that there are some people storing water and there are some people that are experiencing solid waste management problems. But I think, and this is also the case of Sao Paulo, if the conditions that brought the mosquito are there and unchanged, if the social and economic conditions are there the epidemic can come back. So in the case of Sao Paulo, Human Rights Watch have said, yeah, a lot of things were done from the point of view of epidemiology but if you look at the social conditions of Rio de Janeiro and of the big inequalities there it can happen again because everything is the same. The same people that were poor before are poor today. The same people that were experiencing problems with water are experiencing water problems today. So I think I will point to that. But of course I don't know the Indian case. No, thank you very much for the answer. I think that also answers one of the other questions. Well, there is Joshua Aurea asked, like he had a dengue outbreak in Mombasa and Dar es Salaam 2017 and he wants to know, so okay, you just explained about the social factors, but is it in this case, do you know if it could have been due to the flesh floods or how long is the breeding period of this mosquito species he specifically asks? In the case of Barranquilla and in the case of Pemba and Maputo, there are flash flooding events. And I think what is interesting here is that flash flooding is marriage to solid waste management problems. If they were not like, usually cities will have drainage channels, historical ones or natural ones that just form, but what is blocking them, or even they will have very good drainage systems. In Barranquilla, now they are investing huge amounts of money, but if these drainage channels are being blocked because of a solid waste management problem, that there's your flash flood. And I think also I think that we don't see here in the Netherlands, but we see a lot in the South and everywhere is that cities are not plain. They have like a topography that is sloppy so that also will entail and rapid and equal urbanization. There's your flash flood. And of course, any pool of water will be a possible habitat for the mosquito. So yes, flash flooding is really interlinked with this mosquito. And that is why also we see that rainy seasons in all the three countries are the ones where the mosquito will thrive the most. Okay, then I think you have answered this question. I just want to pose it to show that there are other places where these examples exist. So somebody from Italy mentioned, he was referring back to his own childhood, saying that I'm told that mosquitoes and dengue incidents were reported in Italy when I was a kid and maybe even before, but now it's hardly there. So I think, well, you answered that already because it's mainly because of the social structures. Yeah, like I think sometimes I got, it was really funny when during the epidemic, they will tell people don't go to the Caribbean because they're sick, I don't go to the Caribbean because there's such a gunja, especially Sika have everyone very scared. And of course, you can be very unlucky. And if you go to a resort, perhaps you can, yeah, like perhaps be very unlucky and get bitten. But I really doubt it because like, I was in Puerto Rico during Chikungunya outbreak and like things in the Hilton hotel were perfect. You know, they have pools and clean towels, which means they are washing thousands of towels every day. So all the industry, the hotel industry in the Caribbean is based on water, on the conspicuous consumption of water for some. But of course, then at the same time, you had some neighborhoods, and this was before the hurricane that had absolutely no water. They had been without water for weeks and they were harvesting rainwater. And these neighborhoods were full with people that was sick of Chikungunya. And it's a very unreported thing because Chikungunya is not as, it's not deadly or anything. So, yeah, like it's a very, it's very much related to class and to the way water is distributed in the city. So yeah, perhaps if you go to the Caribbean, you won't be in the arreos or in the neighborhoods where the mosquitos are having a big fest. But yeah, like here in Amsterdam, because of the canals, there are mosquitos during the summer with the raising temperature that we are witnessing. Perhaps there will be more mosquitos. But for an epidemic to thrive, I think there have to be other, like more social and like complications that will have some people struggling with water and with waste. Yeah, yeah. So you received another question related to this by email, so this person has not joined the webinar and made, I'm not sure if she would ask the same, but maybe we can put it a bit more strong because she asked, okay, so are mosquitos related to diseases, class sensitive? What about Zika? So you keep referring that that's the case. Would you also, would that be one of your statements or would you still be a bit hesitant or would you like to add something to that? Or is this for you a conclusion? I think, like mosquitos per se are not class sensitive, like I don't want to like put mosquitos, like there is no like mosquitos and people, there is a relationship there. And this relationship has to do with socio-economical factors. Now if you take, if you Google Rio Zika Epidemic Babies the pictures you're going to see and I don't need to put them because they are everywhere on the internet are of a certain type of women. And sometimes you will see a little bit her house and sometimes you will see a little bit her patio and sometimes you will even see the stored water behind her. So yeah, like I can say that Zika in Rio de Janeiro affected the certain type of women, affected the certain type of family. And made vulnerable people more vulnerable. So that tells us a lot about not only class, because like in the case of Barranquilla and that's why I started with the fragment of these Afro-Colombian domestic workers. We're also talking about the history of a country. So in the case of the Caribbean or in the case of Rio de Janeiro, we're talking about race, no? Race as a social construction, as a historical construction that will make Afro-Colombian people more prone to let's say lower incomes, real segregation. That makes them live in these neighborhoods, have these incomes or that is interrelated to it. Yeah, well thank you, Tejana. I have two other questions. One is from Abram. He asks, what are the limitations of using gambusia to limit mosquito larvae in locked water bodies? Now I have been told that that's also called the mosquito fish. So is this something that you can elaborate upon? Is this used a lot or is it most effective? Like whenever you go to southern cities where there are epidemics of dengue or in the case of Colombia, Chikungunya and Zika, scientists and public health officers will tell you, oh we have all these new technologies, all these new ideas and I applaud that and the creativity that I see in Colombia and the amount of work that they have done. It's amazing, like genetic modification of the mosquitoes whether they will be sterile, like exercises of hydroinformatics, like and then fishes and a lot of interventions that are there and I think they are very cool and very interesting and amazing. The limitations I see there is that, yeah, like that is going to be funded everywhere that it's going to be, like I think I have some apprehensions. For example, the fact that people will be told, oh use this fish or use this product and if they don't use it, then it will be their fault that the epidemic is being spread or that the state will invest lots and lots of research funds in this like very interesting research which is necessary but at the same time lose sight of something. Hey, this is related to trash, can we deal with that? There's a big landfill, people are living there. So can we discuss this please? So sometimes when we talk about, yeah, like you're in infrastructure or new things that are going on that are very hip and fashionable, it's great that they're happening but at the same time, let's not forget to talk about the basic things, like let's talk about housing, let's talk about water supply, let's talk about why utilities will get, like they will get out, how do you say that? They will still be rationing some neighborhoods and they will still have like a good reputation. That this is normalized, that it's normalized that some communities will not have access to solid waste management. Why? Well I think I love every single new technology and idea and let's not lose sight of a basic discussion on housing, on social housing, on reparations due to the war, on things like that that are related to the mosquito. Now if I were clear, thank you. I have one last question that is maybe a bit difficult to answer. So the question is raised by Flavia. So are there any actions of measures taken between health security and mosquitoes to decrease the impacts of mosquitoes in rural and urban areas? If yes, what kind of actions measures? Of course you just mentioned a lot and that it's a whole range and it's all interrelated. Is there maybe one thing that you would like to address being the last question of this webinar? Is there one final message that you would like to give the people in the room here? Well thank you very much for the question. I think the one that is, even if there's all this new technology and things going on, the basic measure is health brigades. Health brigades will usually tell people to stop storing water or to close to put lids. This is a measure that has been, like sometimes people would tell you, but people are stupid. Why do not they just cover their water? This is a measure that has been in place for like decades and decades and decades. So people do not do that is because it's impractical because lids get like there's no maintenance of all these things. So in the case of Mozambique, we saw for example in Pemba, lots of wood or zinc placed on the water tanks or people trying to treat their water with chlorine with they call it Certeza, which in certainty in English. That is like the main thing that health brigades will do and they will also try to tell people not to store tires, not to store Checheres, it's called in Spanish, like things that people would store just in case, pieces of bricks and things that can harvest water. This is the main measure that I have seen taken across countries. Yeah, like and of course, like hospitals, prevention campaigns, they will tell people things of how to treat or take care of the water. These are the actions and measures that I have seen mostly. Okay, with that, thank you very much Tatjana for your presentation and thank you all the participants for all the input and the questions. Thank you IHE, I'm Maria and Wim who are in the back organizing the technical facilities also. So I would like to mention that the recording will be there shared on the water channel but also on the YouTube channel of IHE Delft. And with that I would like to wish everybody a very good day. Before finishing it, we have a website and also there you can see all of the members of the team, the amazing researchers that are working on it, it's chasing themosquita.com. We'll put it up here in the chat box. There, no, very good that you say that. And it's also in the references on the page where we put your presentation. So thank you very much Tatjana and... Thank you, thank you very much, Leneke. Bye. And everyone, thank you, gracias. Obrigada.