| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 地理學系 === 97 === Most dengue fever cases are found in southern Taiwan. When the dengue fever was prevalent in southern Taiwan in 2002, Kaohsiung city, with 2,832 cases, outnumbered the rest areas. Kaohsiung county had 1,979 cases and among them, more than 1500 occurred at Fongshan, mainly in Wu-Jia area. There were 185 cases in Kaohsiung county in 2006 and the majority was also in Wu-Jia. Traditional geographical studies of disease utilized spatial logics to study dengue fever in Taiwan, and literature focused on the epidemic policies and on governmental disease-control tools. However, human diseases are not simply biological, physical diffusion, or the political issues of spatial management. Human diseases also contain socio-cultural meaning; they shape the spatial image of places and specific spatial behavior.
We choose Wu-Jia as the study area because dengue fever has been serious. Not as usual, this study applies concepts of medical geography, disease’s socio-culture and labeling theory to reveal how the local residents’ behaviors were shaped. How the specific place image of disease and the interaction between individual practices, institutional forces are formed, is analyzed.
Wu-Jia area is located between Kaohsiung city and county. Geographical proximity and frequent residents interaction between two places make disease spread and disease media spread easily. Water storage containers and waste disposal frequency etc. in Wu-Jia also serve as risk factors. During dengue fever outbreaks, Wu-Jia becomes one evident center of distribution and thus the place image.
The vocabularies of residents at Wu-Jia reflect that the infected area of dengue is associated with unclean space and label the infected area as unclean. Protection against mosquitoes produces fetishism symbolic attachment to some specific products. The fetishism against mosquitoes becomes a guideline. The practice of against mosquitoes imprints particular place image and makes place a meaningful storage of images. A socio-cultural context can often affects human reaction and interpretation. Our social culture has given dengue fever a symbol of ashamed illness, because patients are easily associated with living in unclean space and are alienated by society.
The disease investigation, hygiene propaganda and chemical spray shape the landscape and embody the metaphor of “Wu-Jia as an infected area”. It symbolizes home of dengue fever. The ways Wu-Jia residents respond to institutional practices make them part of dengue symbol and their behaviors also conditioned by the symbol.
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