DengueTools is a European-backed initiative hosted at Sweden’s Umeå University that investigates how to prevent the spread of dengue through better diagnosis, prevention and prediction. Created in 2011 with funding from the European Commission, the research covers three main areas:

Dengue surveillance

Professor Duane Gubler leads the dengue surveillance research team, which looks into effective warning systems, tools to monitor dengue’s impact, and new systems to facilitate dengue diagnosis.

Preventing dengue in children

Another area of investigation is into different strategies to prevent dengue in children. Children are particularly vulnerable to dengue because they spend a lot of their day outside of the home – at school or with carers – and dengue-carrying mosquitoes tend to bite more during the day. Areas of study include designing repellants that could be used on school uniforms.

Dengue’s global presence

The third core area of study is how dengue is moving across the globe – where are dengue cases expanding in number? Where are they shrinking? Which factors affect this change? These teams use modeling of climate, weather patterns, and statistical analysis to calculate the risk of dengue infection relating to the length of stay in a dengue endemic area. This area of research has included a focus on dengue’s potential expansion in Europe.

While their work is still in progress, it would be interesting to see how their research comes along and how it could improve dengue surveillance and control methods across the globe.

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Learn more about the lingering effect of dengue fever below