Software Review

Abstract

This CD-ROM forms part of the evergrowing series entitled Topics in International Health. It is an interactive tutorial tool on dengue, consisting of a series of separate tutorials on all of the main topics, such as epidemiology, case management or social, economic and behavioural aspects, as well as an extensive image collection from a broad variety of dengue programmes in South–east Asia and the Americas. Each tutorial runs independently and concludes with a summary and a review test. There is cross-reference of certain screens and support materials in more than one tutorial, when the content applies to more than one topic. The lay-out is user-friendly, in that the screens are not overloaded with information, secondary windows pop up for further information, and photographs, graphs and video clips are widely used to illustrate the text. When running the tutorial from the compact disc (CD), the transition from screen to screen within a session appears to be instantaneous, but it takes a couple of ‘long’ seconds to switch tutorials or to turn a video clip on. At whom is the CD aimed? The tutorial will be very useful to the dengue novice, as it provides well-rounded information on all of the key aspects. To those dengue specialists preparing presentations for a summer course or a workshop, the CD provides a basis on which to work, both textual and visual, and the summaries and tests help to focus on the main messages to be presented. The co-ordinators who are responsible for actually heading a sound programme of dengue prevention and control will, however, still need to consult additional sources — not because the information per se is missing but because of inadequate prioritization and discordance with the visuals in its support. One explanation for the latter is that many of the support materials weren’t developed specifically for this tutorial but have been ‘borrowed’ from previously existing sources. Some of the visuals are really excellent: the animation of Aedes acquiring and transmitting dengue viruses while biting, for example, or the video of an adult mosquito emerging out of a pupa, were particularly illustrative. Many of my students, I find, are unable to spot mosquito larvae, despite the generalized infestation by Aedes albopictus of the Baltimore area where I live and teach. I looked for a good slide of mosquito larvae as they appear to the naked eye or a video of their fine movements but couldn’t find either in this CD. What I will do, instead, is borrow from the video clip of guppies eating larvae, in the Prevention and Control tutorial (vector control screen 3 on biological control). I also did not find a screen explaining how the dengue mosquito has to lay its eggs on container walls, differentiating its larval habitats from those of Anopheles and Culex species. I have often witnessed newspapers (and occasionally even healthcommunication materials) incorrectly portraying cesspools and puddles as the source of dengue mosquitoes; as a matter of fact, this same error appears in the Social, Economic and Behavioural Aspects tutorial of the CD, as a picture of standing water below a latrine on stilts. Nor did I find a picture of the eggs themselves stuck on the containers, which seems odd given that, in the main-measures table of the Prevention Annals of Tropical Medicine & Parasitology, Vol. 100, No. 1, 91–93 (2006)