“Dengue fever has killed 45 people in Malaysia this year — a jump of more than a third from the same period last year — as the tropical country struggles to tame a mosquito-borne virus outbreak that has plagued the Southeast Asian region for decades,” the Wall Street Journal’s “Southeast Asia Real Time” blog reports. “The disease has claimed hundreds of lives in the Southeast Asian region this year and is a chronic problem from Africa to Asia to Latin America,” with reports of the disease in Europe in recent years, the blog notes. The blog includes data from neighboring countries in the region, including Singapore, Thailand and Laos, where the number of cases has increased, and the Philippines, where there has been a small decline in the number of reported cases this year (Gangopadhyay, 10/1).