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Mosquito Menace: Dengue Fever and Public Health in Singapore, 1965 – 2000 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.123345 Sim, Timothy Brazelton, Mary Augusta Dengue, currently the world’s fastest growing vector-borne disease, is often framed as a “neglected tropical disease” or an “emerging infectious disease”. But dengue is far from novel in Singapore, a tropical island-nation that has dealt with the disease for decades. This dissertation charts a previously unexplored history of dengue fever in Singapore from 1965 to 2000. From 1965 to 1985, the country achieved worldwide recognition for its successful control of dengue through anti-mosquito campaigns and environmental measures. However, annual epidemics returned after 1985, prompting a serious re-evaluation of the dengue control program in the 1990s. Today, epidemics remain a problem in Singapore, with new highs reported almost every year. This thesis traces the rise and subsequent fall of the Singaporean anti-dengue program. Four thematically distinct chapters explore how this trajectory was made possible by specific features of Singaporean politics and social relations, even as dengue changed these relationships. Chapter 1 traces the early institutionalisation of the anti-dengue program and highlights the entangled nature of colonial malaria control and postcolonial dengue control. Chapter 2 shifts away from the state to focus on how public responses to anti-mosquito campaigns influenced the state’s approach to mosquito control, the day-to-day work of health inspections, and systems of surveillance for epidemic disease. This reciprocal influence complicates top-down narratives of state-led public health in Singapore. Chapter 3, on international dengue networks, examines how Singaporean scientists and health officials used the success of dengue control to gain recognition within elite scientific networks. The chapter uses Singaporeans’ preference for engaging with “global” Western networks over regional Southeast Asian ones to consider how “the global” in global history is as much an actor’s category as a historiographical approach. Finally, Chapter 4 analyses contemporary explanations for dengue’s return after 1985 and critically examines the continuing relevance of crisis narratives in motivating and constraining public health. Taken together, these chapters show that the supposedly apolitical project of mosquito control was critical to the construction of new forms of sanitary citizenship and governance in Singapore. University of Cambridge 2025-08-01 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng Fitzwilliam College- Kuok Family – Lee Kuan Yew PhD Studentship https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/392714 embargo 2026-11-19 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/1bbc7606-f0ba-4800-955a-445ebbb9ed34/download e35ad2d5d228f759fa31daa090b1b835 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/6808fbbf-a424-4f18-8996-6200b8de6ddc/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved dengue fever history of medicine history of science Singapore mosquito