A bout of dengue starts with a pounding headache and a blazing fever. Next come excruciating body cramps and joint pain that render the stricken listless and useless for days on end. And that's if you're lucky. In its most extreme or "hemorrhagic" version, dengue is a killer. So far, 88 people have succumbed in this year's outbreak in the state of Rio de Janeiro, almost half of them children. And although the epidemic that turned the hospitals in Brazil's signature city into refugee camps now looks to have peaked, the balmy tropical autumn will surely keep the body count ticking higher over the next few months.

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.