This story appeared in the July/Aug 2020 issue as "When the Fever Doesn't Break." Subscribe to Discover magazine for more stories like this.
As soon as I felt the plane nose toward Dhaka, Bangladesh, I started preparing. I pulled up my socks, rolled down my sleeves and fished a hat out of my bag. The temperature on the ground was in the upper 80s, but I tried to cover every slice of skin. Anything exposed — hands, neck, ears — got a healthy dose of 100 percent DEET.
In the preceding weeks, reports of dengue fever had been mounting in this waterlogged country, and most were coming out of the crowded capital toward which I was descending. The outbreak had developed into the worst dengue epidemic in Bangladeshi history. It was even more dire in other parts of Southeast Asia.
