It all starts with a fever. It’s the first signal that an outbreak of disease could be moving silently through the population.
At a health centre in a busy area of the Senegalese capital, Dakar, no cases of dengue had been detected before 2023. In the following nine months, more than 200 cases were spotted. The illness had always been there – in homes and clinics, people were developing the warning signs of intense pain in the joints and bones that lend the mosquito-borne disease its nickname of “breakbone fever”. But these cases were invisible until a surveillance site, set up by the Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD), brought them under the microscope.
