Dengue fever climbs the social ladder

Dengue fever was once a disease restricted to poor people in tropical areas. Its resurgence now threatens middle-class urbanites in cities such as Singapore. Ewen Callaway asks whether Asia's ever-growing wealth will propel a treatment or vaccine to market.

He was a 25-year-old rock-climber, educated to university level and from a middle-class family in Singapore. But last month, Ian Ng hit the headlines for the worst reason. He became the city-state's fourth and youngest victim of dengue fever this year. Ng was taken to hospital vomiting and feverish on 21 July, but he died from the mosquito-borne virus less than 24 hours later.

The booming cities of southeast Asia are experiencing their worst dengue outbreak in a decade — early rains and unchecked urbanization have promoted the spread of the virus-carrying mosquitoes. Singapore, which almost managed to wipe out the pandemic disease in the 1980s, has already had 5,000 infections this year. In Indonesia, more than 100,000 people have contracted dengue and 1,100 have died, coming close to the figures for all of 2006, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Malaysia, Cambodia, the Philippines, Myanmar and Thailand are all experiencing a similar surge in the disease. Monsoon flooding across India, Nepal and Bangladesh threatens to worsen the situation by causing an explosion in mosquito populations.(...)