Today, April 7th. is World Health Day, an annual event sponsored by the World Health Organization to help bring attention to pressing public health issues.

This years event focuses on vector borne diseases like dengue fever and Chagas disease, which are transmitted through a third party host such as Aedes mosquitoes or triatomines (kissing bugs).

Both of these diseases are becoming increasingly relevant as the world urbanizes. Dengue and malaria form a complementary nexus of diseases. Malaria is largely associated with rural areas, and rarely found in cities, where dengue fever is almost exclusively found in urban areas. Generally speaking, dengue is a disease of development, where malaria is a disease of the lack of development.

While known to be distributed widely through Latin America and Southeast Asia, dengue has yet to make it on Africa’s radar yet, simply (in my opinion) because not enough people are looking hard enough. Africa, as the most rapidly urbanizing area of the world will eventually face a double burden of dengue and malaria and health facilities aren’t yet prepared to deal with it.