Why Human Practices?

1. We have responsibility to do researches and explain it in the way that can be understand by common people. Going to somewhere and socialize with a lot of common people, it make us feel like a real human being. Not just stuck in lab and meeting with the supervisors, talking about our project progress. That is why human practice is important to us.

2. We need to build a networking with the other research institute, company, university and the government through official department related to our project.

3. Synthetic biology is still new in Indonesia. We have to spread it and reveal the benefits.

Key Achievements

1. Build a good engagement with common people in society by creating pilot villages to rescue of Dengue case.

Dengue fever events in Indonesia is still high until now. In Indonesia which is tropical country especially in East Java, one of the region in Indonesia. East Java become the “band of dengue” which has a lot of history with dengue fever abundance. Under the reason of that, we are trying to make this our own country’s problem to be solved by our project, to detect more dengue fever incidence, then we can prevent further danger events. So we collaborated with ministry of health in East Java, which we were conducting survey directly to village and research about the dengue fever statistics. It’s true, that dengue fever has successfully become the most frequent cause of fever in East Java since 2005. Prevalence of dengue fever reach more than 9.000 patient in 2014, and still rise until half of 2015 year reach 10.000 since the beginning of the year. And it is more interesting, because dengue fever is like an “ice-berg phenomenon” which is a lot more patients out of hospital or ministry scoop being underdiagnosed, because dengue fever’s symptoms variety and low awareness of sign and symptoms of dengue fever which really capable turns into the danger form. So, we would like to make people become more aware and easy-find dengue fever, because by making people more aware, it is easier to prevent mortality by early treatment as well.

We build an integrated and continuous human practice project in collaboration with health department in East Java Province, Kediri City since 2014 and recently a company from Japan, Kyushu Medical Co. Ltd., join this project. Together, we create some pilot villages to rescue the Dengue outbreak over there. Recruited some local people and train them how to prevent the dengue fever, recognize the dengue fever symptoms as early as possible, supress the dengue case and recognize the dengue vector, mosquito including the morphology, active time and biting target and behaviors. These local people will be our front line to help our communities in the villages. We called them JUMANTIK (mosquito larva monitoring troops). Final output will be one house one JUMANTIK. Once in a month, we come to the villages, monitoring and observing the activity and mosquito population.

Educating and recruiting some local people to be JUMANTIK is the best project to save our communities from dengue fever. It was not an easy work to have an engagement. But, as time goes by, local people very care with these mosquito ‘issues’. Together with JUMANTIK, most of them, with self-consciousness, take care their environment and avoid anything that could be a means of mosquito breeding. We are very glad when they were able to accept the presence of JUMANTIK. They welcome us like a family when we come to visit their house one by one to observe the conditions.

Result:

- A. aegypti as the primer vector are more in the house (69%)

- A. albopictus as the secondary vector are less in the house (31%)

- The population are fluctuating, it will be higher in the transition season, from rainy season to dry season around March and vice versa around September.

2. Spreading and popularizing synthetic biology by campus roadshow and cooperate with local media partner.

We did some campus roadshows to Institut Teknologi Sepuluh November (ITS Surabaya) and Airlangga University in collaboration with SynBio UB. These campus already heard about synthetic biology, but still a little bit confused about it. And there is a possibility that they will join for iGEM in the next year. Media partner is very meritorious to spread about iGEM and our project. Soon after this news was published, a father who his son passed away as a result of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever come to us to support our project and hope it will be real. Unfortunately, he did not want to be documented. We pray for your son and the other dengue victims.