Dengue Exploding Globally: Worldwide Cases 500,000 In 2000; 14 Million Cases In 2024, W. 9,000 Deaths
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Dengue was once a hazard throughout the Americas, but pesticide-spraying campaigns appeared to vanquish the disease by the mid-1900s. Peru declared the Aedes aegypti mosquito — the main carrier of dengue — eradicated in 1958. But with an outbreak in 1990, the worm began to turn, in Peru and around the world. Now, the number of dengue fever cases reported globally has been growing for decades, from 500,000 cases reported to the World Health Organization in 2000 to over 5 million in 2019.
While improved disease reporting accounts for part of this tenfold increase, experts primarily blame urbanization — which creates ideal conditions for the Aedes mosquito by providing ample pockets of water for it to breed in and dense human populations to bite once hatched — and the explosion of air travel, which enables the disease to escape endemic zones. As a result, dengue is the most common and fastest-growing mosquito-borne disease in the world. But something else has happened in just the past few years. In 2023, the global case count approached 7 million — a 40 percent jump in a single year. And even that new record was crushed in 2024, when 14 million dengue cases and 9,000 deaths were reported worldwide, the majority of them in the Americas.
“It’s different from earlier years when dengue was around but you don’t see it much,” said Luciano Andrade Moreira, an agricultural engineer and entomologist in southern Brazil. Seventeen cities in Brazil declared states of emergency. Hospitals overflowed. So many people were sick that the crisis began to assume the character of society-wide disorder, similar to that experienced during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Some supermarkets didn’t have enough cashiers to staff checkouts. “You see the disease coming next to you,” said Moreira, whose brother and sister-in-law were both infected.
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Across South America, researchers and public health departments are working furiously to make such a warning possible. The strategy, years in the making, is something of a double-tipped spear. One tip is the use of machine learning to predict outbreaks months in advance. The other enlists the natural world to prevent dengue spread in the first place, releasing hundreds of millions of mosquitoes that have been carefully infected with a dengue-blocking bacteria into cities. When these mosquitoes breed with their wild brethren, they suppress the disease in future generations. Unlike the reactive pesticide-spraying campaigns that defined vector-borne disease control throughout the 20th century, these programs seek a more deliberate cooperation with existing ecosystems. But they also face substantial logistical and political challenges, requiring public officials to spend money on programs that won’t pay obvious dividends for years — assuming anyone notices their success at all. But as dengue changes shape, health officials in countries like Peru and Brazil are not just noting the value of investing in such an approach, but demanding it.
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https://grist.org/health/the-fight-to-stop-climate-fueled-dengue-fever-mosquitoes/