In 2003, while on a research trip in Ecuador, Peter Larsen fell deathly ill. He was bedridden for days with a crushing fever, severe headache and joint pain, and exhaustion. For over two decades, he suspected he’d contracted dengue—often called "breakbone fever" because of the severity of its symptoms—but he didn’t know for sure until he began preparing for his most recent expedition to Malaysia.
"I had my antibodies checked, and the test confirmed I’d been exposed to dengue," says Larsen, an associate professor in the University of Minnesota (UMN) College of Veterinary Medicine (CVM). But contracting dengue no longer requires a trip to Ecuador or another far-flung place.
Larsen’s experience is part of a staggering global trend. In the last 20 years, dengue cases have skyrocketed nearly tenfold, with the World Health Organization estimating that up to 400 million people are infected annually. Today, almost half of the world's population lives in areas at risk for the disease, as warming temperatures and rapid urbanization allow mosquitoes to push into regions that were once too temperate to support them.
The growing risks underscore why Larsen and a team of UMN researchers and graduate students from the Universiti of Malaysia, Sarawak recently spent three weeks trekking through the intense humidity of Borneo. The UMN researchers included Jon Oliver from the School of Public Health, along with wildlife epidemiologist Kendra Phelps, postdoctoral researcher Evan Kipp, and PhD student Lexi Frank—all members of Larsen’s lab at CVM. They were there to study the virus, with the ultimate aim of getting ahead of it.
