World Mosquito Day + dengue, malaria: Johns Hopkins experts available

This week, ahead of World Mosquito Day on Tuesday, August 20, top experts from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are available for interviews to discuss the ongoing threat of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue. 

 The facts:

• Earlier this summer, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning about the elevated risk of dengue in the U.S., noting that “global incidence of dengue in 2024 has been the highest on record for this calendar year; many countries are reporting higher-than-usual dengue case numbers.” 
• According to the World Health Organization, more than 7.6 million dengue cases have been reported globally as of April 2024, including 3.4 million confirmed cases, over 16,000 severe cases, and over 3,000 deaths. Increases over the past five years have been particularly pronounced in North America and South America. 
• In 2022, malaria took more than 600,000 lives in 85 countries, the majority being children under age 5 in sub-Saharan Africa. More than half of the world’s population is at risk of being infected. In the U.S., several cases of locally acquired malaria—transmitted to people with no history of recent travel to malaria-endemic areas—were detected last year. They were the first such cases in two decades.

 The experts: 

• Jane M. Carlton, PhD, is director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Malaria Genomics and Global Public Health. Her research is focused on using genomics—the interdisciplinary study of an organism’s complete set of genes and DNA, or genome—to further understand the biology and evolution of malaria parasites and their mosquito vectors. 
• George Dimopoulos, PhD, is deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. He studies vector-borne diseases and how mosquitoes can be genetically modified to render them incapable of transmitting human pathogens.
• Anna Durbin, PhD, is a professor in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She studies experimental vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, dengue, West Nile virus, Zika, malaria, and more in human clinical trials and in controlled human infection studies.

Resources: 

• Increased Risk of Dengue Virus Infections in the United States
• Data and Statistics on Dengue in the United States
• What to Know About Malaria in the U.S.
• How Dangerous is Dengue?
• Preventing Dengue
• Dengue – Global situation