By: Siri Chundru

18 November 2025

While visiting India in the summer of 2024, my mom got a call from her childhood friend. My family, who had been more than excited to explore the city of Hyderabad, was shocked to hear that her son was currently hospitalized with dengue fever. My mom sat stunned as her friend told us her son had a fever, a high white blood cell count, abnormal liver tests, and ached so badly, he felt worse than getting hit in the ribs with a cricket bat. She was the first to warn us that the country was seeing a rise in the dangerous mosquito-borne disease.

Living in California and completely unaware of the events happening in India, I had put myself at risk from an illness I had never heard of. Dengue fever is only one among the many viral illnesses that Western media often sidelines or underreports, largely due to the regions that they primarily affect.

By focusing predominantly on Western stories and overlooking those from other countries, the press not only leaves us ignorant but also puts us in danger. As the globe grows more interconnected, it becomes necessary that American news organizations begin to cover international health on a deeper level.

Vox news shows that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many media outlets downplayed the severity of the illness and compared it to the flu. The LA Times even argued there was no reason to fear a disease “that has not killed people here in this country.” China had already quarantined 50 million people, while Americans were left with a false sense of safety that underprepared them for the epidemic that followed. 

If dengue made as many headlines as the measles outbreaks currently do, other travellers like me would have had enough information to prepare themselves. While it is certainly impossible for reporters to cover every story in the world, it seems reasonable to ask that media networks actively try to headline more global health articles, especially those about illnesses spreading outside of U.S. borders.

Not only would this warn and brace Americans about international diseases on the rise, but it may also help healthcare workers treat patients appropriately. Like me, Ann Arbor Physician Dr. Deborah Heaney did not take dengue into account while vacationing in the Caribbean. In her opinion piece to the New York Times, she recounts that doctors back in Michigan were unable to diagnose her illness and sent her home after treating her symptoms. It only occurred to her two days later that she might have contracted dengue fever, which she did. Dr. Heaney argues that nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers need to be more informed about diseases outside America to provide patients with the right treatments. 

Even travelers themselves should not need to deep dive into illnesses local to their vacation spots. Instead, when other regions, like the Caribbean or India, are experiencing outbreaks, the disease needs to appear in headlines. 

Visiting India at a time when dengue cases were rising, without actually knowing the dangers that I faced, created a false sense of safety for me. I had no need to challenge my American belief that mosquito-borne diseases were rather rare. It never crossed my mind that other countries with different economic, geographic, and social standings would have very different ideas of what should be regarded as “rare.”

Tuberculosis, considered to be the deadliest infection in history, has taken the lives of nearly one billion people throughout its time. For context, the black death that wiped out a third of Europe took 50 million lives. The World Health Organization claims that, unlike the Black Death, Tuberculosis continues to infect and kill 4,000 people each day, even with a cure available. Most Americans don’t even know it exists. Why? Because it was cured in America. Although the disease is still present and deadly in countries like India, Nigeria, and Indonesia, Western Media rarely mentions it or its death toll of over 1 million people each year. Since TB is an infectious disease that has every opportunity to reach American soil, our media should be educating the people about its presence instead of nurturing the belief that Tuberculosis is a disease of the past by neglecting to mention it.

Alas, my family spent our heavily anticipated vacation sitting indoors, paranoid that each bump on our skin was a mosquito bite. Back home, I came to the realization that dengue fever, with approximately 400 million cases each year, needed to appear on media headlines. For the protection of American citizens, tracking and highlighting international health crises needs to take greater priority in our daily lives.