My brush with dengue was excruciating

 

My brush with dengue was excruciating. What’s even scarier is how fast it’s spreading.

When the chills, body shivers, and pounding headache first hijacked my system, I was 30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, midway through a 14-hour flight to Manila in the Philippines. My home in Baja California Sur, Mexico, was some 5,000 miles behind me. And I had no clue which pathogen had stowed itself away in my bloodstream before my departure.

Four days later – following many visits to pharmacies and a small island clinic – a volley of blood tests finally revealed what was wrecking my body: dengue fever, also known as breakbone fever.

Fittingly for the disease’s common name, it was the sharp and nearly-paralyzing body aches in my ankles, calves, and even between my fingers that prompted my Filipino medical team to test for dengue.

The virus has a long history in the Philippines and Mexico alike. But dengue had hardly crossed my mind while I was living the past year in the arid, subtropical desert of Baja California Sur, Mexico. Still, just before my infection in September 2025, a series of tropical storms had soaked the landscape, turning it green and ripe for mosquito propagation.

On day seven after my symptoms began, I was hospitalized as my blood platelet count dropped dangerously low.

The fingerprints of climate change

Dengue fever now ranks as the world’s fastest-growing and one of the most common mosquito-borne diseases. Case counts have accelerated in parts of Mexico, Latin America, and Southeast Asia in recent years – fueled by globalization and climate change, according to multiple recent studies.

Climate research now forecasts a significant rise in dengue exposure and transmissions by midcentury as global temperatures increase, plaguing places where it already circulates as well as cooler regions where significant outbreaks have been less common historically.

“Climate change allows mosquitoes to move to places where they previously could not survive,” said Jose Ramos-Castañeda, a dengue expert with Mexico’s Center for Research on Infectious Diseases in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in Spanish.

The mosquitoes spreading dengue

The culprits behind the spread of the virus are the common Aedes aegypti mosquito and, in some places, the Aedes albopictus mosquito.

Both species transmit it to humans via discrete bites to the skin. Although a dengue patient can’t directly infect someone else, mosquitoes spread dengue when they bite one infected person and then move on to another victim.

Both species prefer urban settings and bite during daylight hours. They also transmit yellow fever, Zika, and chikungunya viruses.

The females feed on human and animal blood for protein to sustain egg production (males don’t bite). They lay their eggs in still water, often preferring small containers like tires or debris. And one individual mosquito can live up to eight weeks, feeding on many humans in that life span.

Globally, mosquitoes cause more than 700,000 deaths per year, making them the world’s deadliest animals. And our planet, in some ways, is becoming more hospitable to them.