Creationist drives readers bananas

Need a bookmark to go with your Ray Comfort edition of "On the Origin of Species?" The National Center for Science Education has thoughtfully provided one on its web site dontdissdarwin.com. Comfort, a Christian evangelist, distributed 200,000 copies of "Origin" free at 100 colleges around the country this week, including Emory. The catch? Comfort wrote an outlandish introduction in the edition, denouncing evolution.

"They made this version of the book to pass out to unknowing people who are thinking that they're getting a copy of 'Origin of Species,' when they're really just advancing the creationist agenda," biologist Jacobus de Roode told the Emory Wheel. "It's very bad, and it makes me very angry."

"I think Darwin's rolling over in his grave right now," added freshman June Lee.

Read the full article in the Wheel.

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Getting a grip on cultural evolution

How did humans go from the ability to make a stone axe to a computer mouse? Science writer Matt Ridley posed that question during his keynote for the conference on the Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture.

Both objects are designed to fit into the human hand. “But the hand axe was made to a design that continued to be used for about one million years,” Ridley said. “There’s no continual innovation or progress.”

And while a hand axe was knapped by a single person, a computer mouse requires the efforts of many. “It’s not just the people in the computer mouse company that made it, it’s the people who drilled the oil well from which the oil came for making the plastic. The point is that human intelligence went from being individual to being collective. And that, I think, is the crucial thing that we have to try and understand about the human breakout from being just another species to being this extraordinarily ecologically dominant species.”

So why, when and where did human intelligence become collective?

Ridley argued that, just as sex and the exchange of genes is crucial to speeding up biological evolution, trade and the exchange of goods was the major driver of cultural evolution and the accumulation of innovations.

“The actual swapping of one object for another is unknown outside our species,” Ridley said.

Ridley is the author of “Nature via Nurture,” among many other science books, and the forthcoming “The Rational Optimist.”

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Wolves in political clothing

Leaving everyone to fend for themselves is not natural, says primatologist Frans de Waal. He writes as a guest blogger for the Washington Post about animal empathy and its political implications:

"On its own, a wolf cannot bring down large prey, and chimpanzees slow down for companions who cannot keep up due to injuries or sick offspring. Why accept the assumption of cut-throat nature when there is so much proof to the contrary? Empathy is an ancient capacity found in all mammals, ranging from dogs to apes." Read the full article by de Waal.

Don't miss an informal, public discussion between Frans de Waal and Out of Hand Theater's Ariel de Man this Sunday, Nov. 15, at 4 p.m. at Dobbs University Center. They will be discussing the new play Hominid, opening on campus tonight.

De Waal will also be among the speakers at the Evolution of Brain, Mind and Culture conference, ongoing today and tomorrow in the Reception Hall of the Carlos Museum.

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Gestures may point to speech origins

Did speech evolve from vocal chords or bodily movements?

Body movement, particularly with the hands, appears to be ingrained in human communication. “All humans gesture. They gesture when they talk on the phone, they gesture even if they know the other person can’t see them,” says primatologist Amy Pollick. She is studying evolutionary precursors to speech in chimpanzees at the Yerkes Living Links Center at Emory.

“Chimp vocalizations can actually be quite complex, but they don’t have as many vocalizations as they do gestures,” she says.

Watch an interview with Pollick in this excerpt from a Swedish documentary. Photo at top shows a scene from the documentary, "On the Road with Homo Sapiens."

Ape murder-suicide leads to human drama

A conniving kingmaker and his young protégé conspire to overthrow a popular king. Their plot fails, so they murder him instead. The kingmaker then installs his protégé as ruler. The young king does not properly reward his mentor, however, so the kingmaker selects a new protégé. Together, they torment the young king to the point of madness. He throws himself into the palace moat and drowns.

The brutal power struggle reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, but it actually happened on an island of captive chimpanzees at a Holland zoo during the late 1970s. Emory primatologist Frans de Waal documented the events in his best-selling book “Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes."

And now, in a strange case of art aping life, the true story has been turned into a fictional play – with human actors taking the names and roles of the chimpanzee characters.

“We are all apes,” is the central message of “Hominid,” (photo at top shows a rehearsal) playing at Emory Nov. 12-22. Theater Emory commissioned Atlanta’s Out of Hand Theater to create the evolution-themed work – a collaboration of playwrights’ imaginations and de Waal’s research. Scenes from a documentary by Bert Haanstra of the chimpanzees are also woven into the stage performance.

“We tell the story as though it’s a human story,” says Ariel de Man, the play’s project director. After receiving her theater degree from Emory in 1998, de Man co-founded Out of Hand, which specializes in working with scientists to translate their research.“There is so much science happening right here in our midst in Atlanta that the general public doesn’t know about,” she says. “Scientists are trained to do research, but they’re not trained to communicate to a non-science audience.”

“Hominid” sets the murder-suicide in a 1920s garden party. “The characters are athletic and graceful and charming,” de Man says. “The point is, it doesn’t matter how educated or sophisticated you are – we are all apes. We are inviting the audience to think about what that means.”

Top evolution scholars from Emory and abroad will also be speaking on campus next week, during a conference, "The Evolution of Mind, Brain and Culture."

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A new twist on an ancient story

“Evolution is a theory that we have more experimental evidence for than any other theory, and yet 50 percent of the population of the United States doesn’t accept it,” said David Lynn, professor of chemistry and biology, during a recent Creativity Conversation with choreographer David Neumann. “Maybe we’ve taken the wrong path in talking about evolution. In science we do a good job of conveying facts, but not a good job of telling the stories – what makes it human.”

Lynn’s research focuses on the origins of life. His desire to find new ways to explain science to the public inspired him to collaborate with Neumann, and the Seattle troupe Lelavision, as they developed dance performances. Their works, including Lelavision's "Warm Pond" (see photo), recently premiered in Atlanta.

“I was deeply influenced by the manner in which evolution operates and using those structures – contingencies and chance operations – in the structure of the dance,” Neumann said. “Sometimes when you utilize chance there’s a fantastic discovery.”

Watch a video of the conversation between Lynn and Neumann:


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Bug splatter study is data driven

The next time you take a road trip, think before you clean the bug splatter off your car. Those insect remains may actually be more interesting than your vacation photos.

“It turns out that your car is a sampling device for understanding the biodiversity of all the places you’ve been,” says James Taylor, a computational biologist at Emory.

Genome Research recently published a paper by Taylor and collaborators that applied advanced DNA sequencing techniques that are traditionally used on microbial samples to look at insect biodiversity. “We were curious whether these techniques would work for more complex organisms,” Taylor says.

To collect genetic material for the study they used the bumper and windshield of a moving vehicle. Two samples were collected: on a drive from Pennsylvania to Connecticut, and on a trip from Maine to New Brunswick, Canada.

“We found that there is a huge amount of insect diversity, but what was really surprising was to see the enormous amount of novel sequence,” Taylor says. “It’s indicative of how poorly we have sampled the whole tree of life in genome research so far. There’s an enormous amount of species out there.”

Road tested

Taylor is a co-developer of Galaxy, an open-source software system for analyzing genetic data. The Galaxy developers recently refined the system, creating the Galaxy metagenomic pipeline that allows a research team to integrate all of the data, analyses and workflows of a study, and then publish this material as a live online supplement.

The bug splatter paper served as the first test of the metagenomic pipeline.
“I believe that this study is one of the most transparent and reproducible bioinformatics papers ever,” Taylor says. “Anyone can go online, follow links and see every step of our analysis and exactly what parameters were used. And they can take our data and do their own analysis of other questions.”

No computational experience is required to use the free Galaxy system, Taylor says. “All of science is becoming computationally intensive, so tools like this are needed to improve transparency.”

DNA sequencing technology is getting cheaper, opening more doors for research by small investigators, and Taylor is focused on serving this niche.

“Nowadays, you can have a crazy idea like studying bug splatter and without a lot of money or work, you can go out and do it just to see what’s there,” he says.

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Plug your data into the Galaxy

Icons of evolution

Nancy Lowe goes to church more often than most. All she has to do is step outdoors, where she finds the sacred in nature. During breaks from her job as a lead research specialist in biology, you might see her sketching a leaf or a bug somewhere on campus.

“I’m an artist and a naturalist,” she says. “Working as a lab technician is my day job.”

Lowe’s art is featured in the ongoing exhibit at Emory Library’s Schatten Gallery, marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” The eclectic show includes original editions of “Origin,” panoramic “nanoscapes” captured by electron microscopes and a retrospective of how poet Ted Hughes’ work evolved.

Lowe’s contribution is a series of luminous paintings called “Species Icons.” On canvases glinting with gold leaf, a pitcher plant wears a halo and tube worms are strung with jewels.

“Medieval religious icons seem to glow with a certain power,” Lowe says. “They’re old and precious. I wanted to combine that feeling with the careful attention to detail in scientific illustration of organisms. For me, that’s what’s sacred – the amount of geological time that it has taken to evolve these species.”

The paintings also grew out of a question that Lowe says she’s pondered for years: “Now that evolution has become our primary creation story, what should we put on our stained glass windows?”

After graduating from the Art Institute of Chicago, Lowe worked in video and film before discovering her love of illustrating nature. She volunteered as an artist for a species inventory project in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She regularly teaches art, in addition to making her own. The name of her web site, "look at your fish", comes from 19th-century naturalist Louis Aggasiz. He would give his students a pan containing a pickled fish and leave them alone to stare at it for hours.

Careful observation is important to art, as well as science, she says. “I want my students to ask, ‘What’s this little bristle for on this bug?’ and realize that every structure is connected to some function. It all comes back to evolution.”

A microscope can distance scientists from their subjects, Lowe says. “We’re looking at things now through a molecular and a genetic lens. That is a more cerebral pursuit. I think we’ve lost something about teaching students to love the organism.”

Fish vision makes waves in natural selection

Emory researchers have identified the first fish known to have switched from ultraviolet vision to violet vision, or the ability to see blue light. The discovery is also the first example of an animal deleting a molecule to change its visual spectrum.

Their findings on scabbardfish, linking molecular evolution to functional changes and the possible environmental factors driving them, are in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This multi-dimensional approach strengthens the case for the importance of adaptive evolution,” says evolutionary geneticist Shozo Yokoyama, who led the study. “Building on this framework will take studies of natural selection to the next level.”

The research team included Takashi Tada, a post-doctoral fellow in biology, and Ahmet Altun, a post-doctoral fellow in biology and computational chemistry.

For two decades, Yokoyama has done groundbreaking work on the adaptive evolution of vision in vertebrates. Vision serves as a good study model, since it is the simplest of the sensory systems. For example, only four genes are involved in human vision.

"It's amazing, but you can mix together this small number of genes and detect a whole color spectrum," Yokoyama says. "It's just like a painting."

The common vertebrate ancestor possessed UV vision. However, many species, including humans, have switched from UV to violet vision, or the ability to sense the blue color spectrum.


Fish provide clues for how environmental factors can lead to such vision changes, since the available light at various ocean depths is well quantified. All fish previously studied have retained UV vision, but the Emory researchers found that the scabbardfish has not. To tease out the molecular basis for this difference, they used genetic engineering, quantum chemistry and theoretical computation to compare vision proteins and pigments from scabbardfish and another species, lampfish. The results indicated that scabbardfish shifted from UV to violet vision by deleting the molecule at site 86 in the chain of amino acids in the opsin protein.

“Normally, amino acid changes cause small structure changes, but in this case, a critical amino acid was deleted,” Yokoyama says.

“The finding implies that we can find more examples of a similar switch to violet vision in different fish lineages,” he adds. “Comparing violet and UV pigments in fish living in different habitats will open an unprecedented opportunity to clarify the molecular basis of phenotypic adaptations, along with the genetics of UV and violet vision.”

Scabbardfish spend much of their life at depths of 25 to 100 meters, where UV light is less intense than violet light, which could explain why they made the vision shift, Yokoyama theorizes. Lampfish also spend much of their time in deep water. But they may have retained UV vision because they feed near the surface at twilight on tiny, translucent crustaceans that are easier to see in UV light.

"Evolutionary biology is filled with arguments that are misleading, at best," Yokoyama says. "To make a strong case for the mechanisms of natural selection, you have to connect changes in specific molecules with changes in phenotypes, and then you have to connect these changes to the living environment." 

Last year, Yokoyama and collaborators completed a comprehensive project to track changes in the dim-light vision protein opsin in nine fish species, chameleons, dolphins and elephants, as the animals spread into new environments and diversified over time. The researchers found that adaptive changes occur by a small number of amino acid substitutions, but most substitutions do not lead to functional changes.

Their results provided a reference framework for further research, and helped bring to light the limitations of studies that rely on statistical analysis of gene sequences alone to identify adaptive mutations in proteins.

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Dancing with the scientists

Will Chemistry Chair David Lynn wow the campus with an interpretive dance on DNA?

Sorry, folks, Lynn will not be performing. However, he did put his toe in the world of dance through collaborations with New York choreographer David Neumann and Seattle’s Lelavision Physical Music group.

Lynn and Neumann will hold a discussion on “Where Dance and Science Meet,” Thursday, Oct. 15 at 4 pm. This weekend, the science-art experiments take the stage in the form of Neumann’s “Big Eater” and “The Accumulation of Change,” combining Lelavision’s kinetic musical sculpture with Lynn’s research on molecular evolution.

Click here for details of all these events.

Watch a video of last spring's initial collaboration with Emory scientists and artists:

Gorilla vet tracks microbes for global health

Innocent Rwego’s hometown of Kisoro, Uganda, is nestled amid the volcanic mountains at the border of Congo and Rwanda – near the habitat of endangered mountain gorillas.

Growing up, however, he never saw a gorilla. “You have to pay to enter the national parks, and most of the locals cannot afford it,” says Rwego, a post-doctoral fellow in Emory's environmental studies department.

Following in the footsteps of his police detective father did not interest him: His childhood idol was the town’s sole veterinarian. When his family went to buy freshly slaughtered meat, he would see Dr. Bisangwa inspecting the carcasses for disease. When one of his grandfather’s cows fell ill, Dr. Bisangwa would be summoned. “I was impressed that he could treat an animal that was down, and it would be up on its feet again in a few hours,” Rwego says.

Dogs in the town were more guards than pets, prized for their ferociousness, and rabies was not uncommon. “Dr. Bisangwa seemed very brave to me,” Rwego says. “He knew how to grab a vicious dog, so that he could immunize it.”

Rwego attended college and veterinary school at Makerere University in Kampala, intending to become a village vet. But near the end of his schooling, he assisted in a mountain gorilla research project.

The researchers entered Bwindi Impenetrable National Park behind a machete-wielding guide who hacked out their path. After hours of hiking through the dense, hilly forest, they came upon a gorilla family, peacefully munching on leaves.

“I was amazed,” Rwego says. “The silverback male was a huge animal, but so quiet and confident.”


After he graduated, Rwego worked in the national park for four years as a mountain gorilla vet. He sometimes had to assist curious young gorillas that set off traps intended for antelope. It was a tricky task. Although gorillas are peaceful animals, the males will attack someone threatening their family members.

Once when Rwego darted a young one, a nearby silverback heard it cry out, charged in, grabbed the tranquilized youngster, and ran off. Rwego’s team followed the gorilla group, and eventually he managed to remove the wires that were cutting into the arm of the young one.

Rwego went on to become a lecturer at Makerere University. He also serves on the scientific committee of the UNESCO DIVERSITAS ecoHEALTH Cross-cutting Network, which is charged with protecting biodiversity.

“I care about the health of all animals – including man,” Rwego says. He studies how the overlap of humans, domestic animals and wildlife contributes to the transmission of disease and parasites.

At Emory, Rwego works with primate disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, who has established one of the world’s leading labs for the medical analysis of gorilla feces. The lab work is hardly glamorous, but intensely important. While the H1N1 flu outbreak started in pigs, ebola and HIV have been linked to wild primates, which are also susceptible to human diseases.

Tracking microbes that move amid species gives scientists a better chance of stemming the next pandemic – or preventing one. “Traditionally, vets work alone, medical doctors work alone and ecologists work alone,” Rwego says. “We need to work together to understand how pathogens are evolving and new diseases are emerging.”

No one is immune to the threat. “The world is becoming a village,” Rwego says. “A disease that breaks out in my hometown can be here within 48 hours.”

Mountain gorilla photos by Innocent Rwego.

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The biology of shared laughter and emotion

"It's almost impossible not to laugh when everybody else is," writes psychologist Frans de Waal, in his new book "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society."

Natural History Magazine offers an excerpt of the book:

"The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their “play face” (as the laugh expression is known), their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.

"Shared laughter is just one example of our primate sensitivity to others. We aren’t Robinson Crusoes, sitting on separate islands; we’re all interconnected, both bodily and emotionally. This may be an odd thing to say in the West, with its tradition of individualism and liberty, but members of the species Homo sapiens are easily swayed in one emotional direction or another by their fellows.
"That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s 'shoes.' And yet empathy is often presented as a voluntary process, requiring role taking, higher cognition, and even language. Accordingly, most scholarly literature on empathy is completely human centered, never mentioning other animals. As if a capacity so visceral and pervasive could be anything other than biological! To counter such widespread views, I decided to investigate how chimpanzees relate to and learn from one another."
Read the full excerpt in Natural History. You can also read reviews of "The Age of Empathy" in the Economist and New Scientist.

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Chimps mirror emotion in cartoons

Animation by Devyn Carter, lead research specialist, using LightWave 3D, NewTek, Inc.

Emory researchers have documented the first example of chimpanzees empathizing with computer animation. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is part of an effort to learn more about the impact of cartoons and video games on the human brain.

“Humans experience emotional engagement with animated characters, empathizing with happiness, sadness or other emotions displayed by the characters,” said Matthew Campbell, a post-doctoral fellow in psychobiology, and the lead researcher. “Previous studies have suggested this type of emotional engagement may be to blame when children mimic violent video games and cartoons, so we thought it important to learn more.”

Yawns were chosen for the chimpanzee study, since they are large, unmistakable expressions, and they are contagious – the way that smiles, frowns and fear are contagious.



The chimps yawned significantly more in response to 3D animations of yawning than they did to animated chimps making control mouth movements.

“Next, we want to study what aspects of animation make it more or less likely to be mimicked,” Campbell said. “One of the first things we’re going to look at is whether realism is important for the chimpanzees to empathize with what they’re seeing."

The knowledge gained could help in the design of animation to promote imitation, such as therapies for children with autism, or to limit imitation, such as violent video games.

Campbell’s advisor is psychologist Frans de Waal, director of the Living Links Center at Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

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Exploring our brains: 'The internal frontier'

“I’m a great fan of physics and astronomy. I think of that as the great external frontier. One can really say that brain science is the great internal frontier,’’ says Dennis Choi, director of Emory’s Neuroscience, Human Nature and Society Initiative.

How does the mind emerge from the brain?

That question particularly intrigues Choi: "As we really begin to understand the biology of the brain, one has to hit this question. So, okay, we know what this molecule is doing, we know what this cell is doing and we know what this circuit is doing – how do I come out of that? Where does my sense of being come from? How do I develop a consciousness? Where are my thoughts, where are my memories?"

Watch the video interview with Choi, known for his groundbreaking research into brain and spinal cord injuries, and his insights into the mind-brain relationship.

Computer games called 'future of education'

In case you missed it this morning, here's the link to a great NPR interview of evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson by game designer Will Wright, covering everything from ants to education:

Computer games are "the future of education," Wilson said. "We're going through a rapid transition and we're about to leave print textbooks behind. For example, I envision visits to different eco-systems that the student could actually enter, taking this path into that hill, with an instructor. It could be a rainforest, it could be a tunda, it could be a Jurassic forest."

Plug your data into the Galaxy

A report from Genome Web: Data-intensive bioinformatics tasks that were once relatively rare are now "permeating every aspect of biology," says James Taylor, a computational biologist at Emory and co-developer of Galaxy, an open-source software system that allows anyone with a normal laptop to analyze genomic data. Read more of the Genome Web article.

An Earthling from the unsequenced genome files:
Malaysian long-tongued nectar bat: Photo by Robert Baker.

Taylor's lab is working with biologist Nicole Gerardo to analyze the first sequencing of the ant genome, as well as the genomics of agricultural ant societies. A key part of the project is bringing genomics into classrooms, by giving high school and college students experience at analyzing genomic data.

"We hope to build up a public research community around this project to facilitate broader analysis," says Taylor, a leading expert in bio-informatics. "We will provide supporting infrastructure to allow people to discover new things. This project is novel – and it's going to be fun."

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Mapping genomics of complex ant system

What genome would you most like to see analyzed?

Mapping genomics of complex ant system

Emory researchers are tapping the latest-generation DNA sequencing technology to become the first explorers of the genomics of agricultural ant societies.

"This project is one of the first attempts to use genomics to understand a complex interacting system, rather than a single organism," says Nicole Gerardo, assistant professor of biology and lead investigator of the project. "If we can understand how these ants have evolved to process huge amounts of organic material over 50 million years, we might discover more efficient ways to process our own waste materials, produce bio-fuels, or improve our agricultural methods."

"We're entering completely new territory," says James Taylor, assistant professor of biology and math and computer science at Emory, and a co-investigator on the project. "DNA sequencing technology is becoming faster and cheaper, but this transition is just happening. The amount of data that this grant is providing us will likely be easily obtainable within five years, but right now we're among the first to explore co-evolution from a genomics perspective."

Read more.

Take a video tour of the world of fungus-growing ants.

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Bug splatter study is data driven

DNA is not destiny

Although DNA cannot be changed, its packaging can be, explains Biology Chair Victor Corces. Growing understanding of how histones guide genes offers hope for therapies to treat a range of disorders. Learn more in this video of the recent "Life of the Mind" lecture by Corces, a leading epigeneticist.

Farming ants reveal evolution secrets

“Ants have been growing fungus for 50 million years,” says biologist Nicole Gerardo. “That provides a lot of time for many adaptations to arise, and for the ants’ agricultural practices to become more advanced.”

For example, bacteria on the body of some ants inhibits a killer of the ants’ fungus crop. “Humans go and buy an insecticide for a particular pest in their gardens, but these ants have the pesticide right on their bodies,” Gerardo says.

The Gerardo lab studies the environmental, chemical and molecular processes that occur between bacteria, the ants and the fungi. This complex symbiosis could provide clues to improving agriculture methods and fighting human diseases.

Take a video tour of the world of these fascinating gardening ants, including micro footage by biology research specialist Nancy Lowe.

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From deadly flu to dengue fever: Rising risks

Uriel Kitron was in Australia last week, assisting health authorities in an outbreak of dengue fever in the state of Queensland, when news broke about the swine flu epidemic in Mexico.

Global travel and human alterations to the environment, such as rapid urbanization, are helping to fuel infectious diseases outbreaks, says Kitron, chair and professor of environmental studies. Kitron's research focuses on vector-borne diseases carried by insects and ticks and the zoonoses – diseases shared by humans and animals.

"In many developing countries, people are moving from rural areas to mega-cities, where they continue to practice subsistence agriculture," Kitron says. "Whenever you have large concentrations of people, domestic animals and poor sanitation and water supply, you have many opportunities for disease transmission."

Deforestation and other human changes to the landscape are other drivers of emerging infectious diseases, he added. "For example, when you bring agriculture into formerly forested areas, you change the migration patterns of animals and expose people and their livestock to more contact with wildlife," he explains.

Unusually hot, wet weather, a rapidly developing strain of the dengue virus, and a human traveler created "a perfect storm" for dengue fever in Queensland, Australia – which is experiencing its worst outbreak in two decades. About 1,000 people have become ill with the mosquito-borne illness. Dengue fever causes severe headaches and joint pain, and exposure to a second strain can result in hemorrhagic fever and death.

Kitron joined other experts in assisting Queensland health authorities. Kitron specializes in spatial epidemiology – using geographic information systems (GIS) and other methods to gather environmental data and create maps to pinpoint disease agents and their vectors in time and space.

The outbreak was traced to a patient who had recently traveled to Papua, New Guinea. "Although quite sick, he didn't go to a doctor for several weeks," Kitron says. "Whenever you have a lag time in diagnosis like that, you miss opportunities to prevent the spread of an outbreak."

Queensland's public health efforts – combined with cooler, drier weather – appeared to have stemmed the dengue fever outbreak for now. However, Kitron says the virus may be re-introduced, or could over-winter and re-emerge in the next hot season.