Traditional policies and programs, based on the use of larvicides and pesticices, have not managed to control the spread of the dengue virus and its vector, the Aedes mosquito. The trend in recent years has been towards strategies that incorporate some form of community participation, but before Camino Verde there was no hard evidence that community engagement actually had an impact on the disease.
In 2011-2012, the Centro de Investigación de Enfermedades Tropicales (CIET) and the University of California, Berkeley, along with local partners in both countries, conducted a study in Nicaragua and Mexico with the aim of assessing the efficiency of community mobilization for sustainable control of the Aedes mosquito. We call this initiative a Camino Verde —a Green Path— to dengue prevention. Three kinds of evidence (see next section) provided the basis for community mobilisation as well as for measuring the results, We gathered this evidence from a panel of urban and rural communities and compared the results from the half of those communities where the mobilisation activities took place (those we label “intervention”) with the other half (which we label “control”) where the intervention was not carried out.
This kind of comparative study is called a cluster randomised controlled trial, because the sites or clusters are randomly assigned to the intervention or control groups, balanced according to the area and children’s entomological and immunological status. Some hundred thousand people participated in the intervention across the two countries. The trial was financed by the UBS Optimus Foundation.
The results of the Camino Verde trial were published in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) in July 2015: http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj.h3267.