Why we chose São Carlos 8

São Carlos’s city, which has 238,950 citizens (SOURCE: IBGE 2015) in the interior of the Brazilian State of São Paulo, was affected by dengue epidemic during the summer, between January and May, situation that have been getting worse by the years.

To justify the importance and necessity of the non-toxic repellent development and also to awareness about means of disease preventions, we seek to intervene in a social and educative way in a needy local community, owner of characteristics which propitiate the disease occurrence.

Figure 1: Neighborhood São Carlos 8

The chosen neighborhood was São Carlos 8, a place where exists a large trashy accumulation on the streets that enable the water accumulation and, consequently, a huge proliferation of mosquitoes, directly affecting the population quality of life. It is one of the regions most affected by dengue disease in the city of São Carlos

Activity in São Carlos 8

Our target was to reach and affect youth with the development of a breakthrough activity that goes out of our lab benches and takes us to improve our artistic skills! Come check us out and have fun!

Figure 2: The scenario of our play.

In 2015, Brazil faced a dengue epidemic, and São Carlos was not different (Wiki link). Despite the campaigns to encourage people to take action for disease prevention (which mainly consists in eliminating sites with accumulated water, where Aedes aegypti mosquitoes can reproduce), this effort is ineffective in combating the disease. So, we had the insight to contribute to awareness of local population, showing that there are people working on developing alternative (and possibly more effective) solutions to this problem.

Dengue is an urban disease and capable of reaching all social classes. Although wealthy neighborhoods have less mosquitoes breeding grounds and richest population has access to improved health services, São Carlos was ravaged by the disease as a whole.

Our first step was to contact social entrepreneurship projects at UFSCar who could help us develop our activity. So, we found Enactus UFSCar, a group of students that carry-out educational activities with children in many neighborhoods of São Carlos, including São Carlos 8. Then, we choose this neighborhood, that represents the living conditions of the majority of the population as the target to our intervention. This community faces the problems that can increase dengue cases (such as the accumulation of waste, for example). Also, this neighborhood has a social organization that assists education of 6-13 years children in the neighborhood, which was very receptive to our proposal. Thus, we decided to conduct our activities at the community center PROVIM Dom Luciano de Almeida.

Figure 3: We and Enactus UFSCar.

As our audience would be children, we have developed a playful way that allowed both approaching dengue issues and approximate children to University reality and research developed there. Thus, our team organized the play "The mighty bacteria against dengue", which addressed the main aspects of the disease, ways of common and alternative prevention, in addition to the role of science in meeting demands of society. The piece was made up of five characters, interacting with each other and with the children. Among the characters, we highlight our “repellent bacteria” (bug-shoo) and the “tire-eater bacteria” (Rubber Bye), representing Brasil-USP Team. Therefore, this activity was a moment of interaction between the two teams, which used the themes of their projects in favor of awareness about dengue.

At the end of the presentation, the audience was divided into 10 groups to carry out the planting of Crotalaria juncea seeds, a plant that supplements dengue prevention. Crotalaria is a plant from Fabaceae family which attracts dragonflies, natural predators of A. aegypti eggs and larvae. Thus, we conducted the planting in PET bottles, helping to reduce the garbage dumps and mosquitoes breeding sites.

Figure 4:PET bottles where the children planted Crotalaria.

During the intervention, we observed that the audience was, somewhat, awared about dengue prevention actions. After our activity, we talked to children and realized our activity impacted them reinforcing the perceptions they already had. We also contributed to introduce alternative measures for the prevention of dengue that science can offer in the future. We felt that our activity aroused children's curiosity about sciences, and this should certainly be explored. This observation led us to want to continue developing activities in this regard.