That's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. Yes, dengue fever is now the bug of the millennium, infecting close to a hundred million people in 100 countries wordwide every year. And there is no vaccine for dengue or even the faint hope that the mosquito, aedes aegypti, that spreads the contagion can be erradicated. But there are ways to fight back, if not to wipe out the disease then at least to keep every outbreak from becoming a funeral procession.

How? Prevention. A number of regions where the contagion has caused havoc in the past have managed to avoid the worst. Until late last century dengue was virtually unknown in the Americas, thanks to a a painstaking, hemispheric, door-to-door mosquito killing campaign. True, the main target back then was not dengue but yellow fever, which is also spread by aedes aegytpi. But slaying one contagion meant avoiding the other, and as late as 1980, both diseases had all but disappeared. Along came "progess" in the form of the great third world industrial revolution, which emptied the countryside and stuffed the cities with poor people in airless slums - perfect incubators for mosquitoes - and suddenly dengue came raging back, from the Antilles to Asuncion. 

But some societies are winning the war against dengue. After two huge outbreaks in 1994 (20,000 cases) and 1998 (14,000), Puerto Rico, with the help of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the U.S. government headquarters for disease research and prevention, has managed to dampen subsequent outbreaks by mobilizing society, on television, in the classroom, and house-by-house, to kill mosquitoes and eliminate the standing pools of water where they flourish. "The problem is not just one of virology or public health, but also of engaging society," says Wellington Sun, head of CDC's Puerto Rico office.

Few countries can match Singapore for disease control. Dengue is now a major killer in Asia, but this city state has managed to beat back the disease. Perhaps one of the reasons is that the authorities act not only  at the height of epidemics, when, alas," it's too late to do much," says Michael Nathan, an insect-borne disease specialist at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Instead, Singapore works to wipe out mosquitoes in off years when the disease (and most politicians) sleeps. Significantly, it's not the public health bureaucracy but the environment and water resources ministry in Singapore that is charged with fighting dengue, a smart move when confronting a disease that thrives in the steamy, waterlogged urban jungle.  

Singapore is not immune; 19 people died from dengue in 2005. But it has proved a model of moving fast and aggressively against the virus before an outbreak gets out of hand. (Case in point: Singapore managed to stop cold a recent global outbreak of a dengue-like virus called chicken gunya after just 13 cases.)  

You don't have to go so far for successful disease control. Last year, Campo Grande, a city of 780,000 inhabitants in southwestern Brazil, was rocked by its worst dengue epidemic in years, with 46,000 cases. Only two people died. The reason: agile nurses and orderlies scurried to medicate victims who were standing on queue at hospitals, hydrating the worst cases with life-saving saline solution, well before physicians arrived.  

My favorite example comes from a little town called Adolfo, 270 kms from São Paulo. Surrounded by cities plagued by dengue, the keepers of Adolfo knew they needed something more than bug repellant to ward off the disease. They needed citizen involvement. So they offered a carrot. Families that managed to eliminate pools of water and unkempt potted plants where mosquitoes flourish were rewarded with free  wideband Internet access. The result: while nearby towns like José Bonifácio have all they can do to keep the mosquito at bay, Adolfo has been dengue free this year. The town fathers called their project Adolfo Connected to the World. They might have called it beating the millennium bug.