Epidemiological burden of dengue fever in Saudi Arabia 2022

Dengue fever (DF) is considered a life-threateningre-emerging infectious condition. Gainor et al. (2022) claim that the first cases of the disease were recorded in the African continent in 1779, and from then on, there have been many outbreaks across the world for all the four main variants (DENV-1-DENV-4), including Comoros, Somalia, Tanzania, Angola, Cape Verde, Benin, and enya (Simo et al., 2019). Alfsnes and colleagues explain that based on epidemiological records that date back to the 16th century, the coastal towns of North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean Islands describe disease-bearing dengue fever symptoms (Alfsnes et al., 2021). These symptoms were found in people aboard commercial vessels arriving from Africa and the Old World. The cargo aboard these ships primarily originated from Africa. Around the same time, epidemiologically similar disease outbreaks were recorded throughout South East Asia, Japan, Egypt, India, and Zanzibar Islands (Alfsnes et al., 2021). Therefore, for many years, a condition fitting the epidemiological and clinical features of the disease currently known as dengue fever was most probably introduced eastwards from the African continent on the returning commercial routes across the Asian sub-tropics.