The Role of Risk Proximity in the Beliefs and Behaviors Related to Mosquito-Borne Diseases: The Case of Chikungunya in French Guiana

Abstract

Abstract.Human behaviors are increasingly recognized to play a key role in the spread of infectious diseases. Although a set of social and cognitive determinants has been consistently found to affect the adoption of health protective behaviors aiming to control and prevent a variety of infections, little is currently known about the ecological drivers of these behaviors in epidemic settings. In this article, we took advantage of the outbreak of chikungunya, a reemerging mosquito-borne disease, that occurred in French Guiana in 2014–15 to test empirically the assumption proposed by Zielinski-Gutierrez and Hayden that the proximity of the disease and perceptions of the natural environment may considerably shape public response to an emerging health threat. To achieve this, a cross-sectional survey was conducted among high school students of the region (N = 1462) at an early stage of the epidemic. Surprisingly, spatial analysis of the collected data leads to counterintuitive results as the participants who lived in the most affected area expressed less concern about the disease and practiced preventive behaviors less frequently than did other participants. These paradoxical results may be attributed to the possible activation of risk denial processes which have previously been observed in the risk perception literature, and described by several social and psychological defensiveness theories.

<p>Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Jinka University Students About Yellow Fever, Ethiopia: A Cross-Sectional Study</p>

“…Besides cognitive determinants, attitudes of individuals play a great role in the adoption of protective behaviors for the prevention and control of infectious diseases. 32 A good or favorable attitude toward disease prevention and control among the younger generation, especially university students, is highly desired to apply good preventive practice during their campus stay in endemic areas. Moreover, the younger generation can spread the important information to a wider community.…”

Understanding the role of disease knowledge and risk perception in shaping preventive behavior for selected vector-borne diseases in Guyana

“…Keeping in mind that these contexts are different from Guyana, the results of such studiesamong others (i.e. mixed method and qualitative studies)-are inconclusive regarding the association between knowledge and behavior: some find a positive association [10][11][12][13][14][15], whereas other find a negative [16] or no association [17][18][19][20][21][22]. This diversity in the findings suggests that the results are context specific and cannot be generalized across different areas/regions and diseases.…”

Factors associated with changing behaviour for arboviruses prevention: evidence from a quasi-experimental intervention study using mobile devices.

“…In fact, in the ACEs group, participants with higher household risk showed more target behaviours in relation to the elimination of mosquito breeding sites. In the literature, some studies have shown that the perception of those residing in risk areas is different from those in areas with lower risk [31], and there are differences between those who live in urban and rural areas [28]. The ndings of the present work give rise to some working hypotheses, which can be tested in further studies with larger samples.…”