Experimental Dengue Vaccine Shows Promise In Clinical Trial Of Adults An experimental dengue vaccine created by the drugmaker Sanofi-Aventis protected a group of healthy adults from all four strains of the virus, “bringing the drugmaker closer to providing the first vaccine against a disease that threatens 40 percent of the…

“Dengue is the world’s fastest-spreading tropical disease and represents a ‘pandemic threat,’ infecting an estimated 50 million people across all continents, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday,” Reuters reports. In a statement, the WHO said dengue “register[ed] a 30-fold increase in disease incidence over the past 50 years,” and the…

With the start of the rainy season, Francisco Duque III, health secretary in the Philippines, on Tuesday emphasized a continued government commitment to controlling and preventing dengue – a disease for which there is currently no vaccine or specific drug, the Manila Times reports.

“An unusually severe dengue epidemic in Singapore has claimed its fifth fatality this year, even as health officials try to beat back the city-state’s worst-ever outbreak of the tropical disease,” the Wall Street Journal’s “Southeast Asia Real Time” blog reports. “The death of a 52-year-old man Tuesday came despite signs…

NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Shots” blog examine how a mobile phone app has helped health officials in Lahore, Pakistan, track and prevent dengue fever. “Two years ago, an estimated 20,000 people in and around the city of Lahore contracted the deadly tropical disease. This year, the region has recorded just…

France’s Sanofi-Pasteur, the world’s largest vaccine maker, said Friday it hopes to introduce a dengue vaccine in 2014 to some high-risk nations, AlertNet reports.

A vaccine against the mosquito-borne infection dengue, the first to reach the final stage of clinical testing, “has seen ‘very promising’ results in Thailand, a specialist involved in the tests said on Friday,” Reuters reports (Petty/Mahlich, 6/10).

“In dengue-endemic areas such as South-East Asia, in contrast to conventional thinking, rural areas rather than cities may bear the highest burden of dengue fever,” according to a study led by Wolf-Peter Schmidt from the Nagasaki Institute of Tropical Medicine in Japan and published in this week’s PLoS Medicine, a PLoS press release states. The authors “analyzed a population in Kanh-Hoa Province in south-central Vietnam (~350,000 people) that was affected by two dengue epidemics between January 2005 and June 2008” and “found that at low human population densities, mostly in rural areas, dengue risk is up to three times higher than in cities, presumably because the number of mosquitoes per individual is higher in low-density areas,” according to the release (8/30).

“More than 12,000 have been infected and 125 people have died over the past two months in Pakistan after coming down with dengue fever, a health department spokesman said Friday,” CNN reports (Habib, 10/1). Citing the same numbers, WHO spokesperson Tarek Jasarevic said the agency is providing support for “case management, community mobilization, vector control and public awareness campaigns,” according to the U.N. News Centre. “Last year, 11,024 confirmed cases of dengue fever and 40 deaths were reported in Pakistan, but this year the number of cases has climbed to 12,466,” the news service writes (9/30).

“An outbreak of dengue fever across much of Latin America has killed 31 people since the start of the year and is showing no sign of relenting,” Agence France-Presse/News 24 reports in a piece that notes the recent increase in dengue cases in the region over the past few years.