Dengue infections are soaring to record highs this month in Pakistan, a country used to frequent and severe dengue outbreaks, as numbers reach nearly 50,000 recorded cases and 80 deaths so far. In this Infectious Thoughts interview, Kamran Rafiq from the ISNTD speaks with Dr. Somia Iqtadar, Chairperson of the Dengue Expert Advisory Group,...

Dr. Muhammad Altaf Khan (City University of Science & Information Technology Peshawar, Pakistan)​ is co-author of a recent paper which presents a deterministic model for dengue virus transmission and aims to investigate the optimal strategy for curtailing the spread of dengue. The model is parameterized using data from the 2017 dengue outbreak...

Dr. Tanvir Rahman is a researcher in the Department of Microbiology and Hygiene at the Bangladesh Agricultural University. In this Infectious Thoughts interview, Dr. Rahman speaks about the current challenges in Bangladesh posed by co-endemic dengue, chikungunya and zika and the urgent partnerships and strategies needed to close current gaps in dia...

Ashwaq Alnazawi is a PhD student from Saudi Arabia, currently undertaking research within the Vector Biology Department at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In this Infectious Thoughts interview, Ashwaq discusses the current dengue threat in Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Health's strategies to tackle this and the important role which Saudi...

Dr. Chin-Hui Yang is Director of the Division of Acute Infectious Diseases at the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control. After several decades of Taiwan being overall dengue-free, the disease is now making a resurgence. In this interview, the ISNTD speaks with Dr. Chin-Hui Yang about the reasons behind this, the national response to dengue prevention...

Dr. Anavaj Sakuntabhai

Institut Pasteur

Functional Genetics of Infectious Diseases

In the age of the 24 hour news-cycle we are all witness to almost continous coverage of dengue outbreaks across South East Asia and Latin America: outside of the obvious regional and climatic vector-disease ditribution, what role does host genetics play in these outbrea...