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The up side of living in a warm, humid climate is that I can gloat in January as my friends to the north are shoveling snow and wondering if they will ever feel warm again. The down side is that mosquito season is never-ending, and I hate mosquitoes. My dislike of these annoying little creatures has solid evidence behind it —this month, Michael Tolle, my colleague at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, lays it out: mosquitoes make us sick! And lest you think that you are protected just because you don't share my warm Januaries, think again—West Nile virus was first reported in the United States in New York.

In this issue, Dr. Tolle reviews the most common mosquito-borne illnesses that affect humans. Most of them are familiar: malaria, yellow fever, dengue, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile virus and filariasis. But who ever heard of chikungunya? The first time I heard Dr. Tolle mention this disease, I thought it sounded more like an interesting dish at an exotic restaurant than a disease. This previously obscure illness has, in the last 5 years, become epidemic in many parts of the world, with millions of cases reported—on one island in the Indian Ocean, more than a third of the population of 770,000 became acutely ill with crippling arthralgia and fever in just a few months in 2005 and 2006.

While most of our readers don't live in areas where these diseases are endemic, it will nonetheless serve us well to know about them and how they are transmitted. Malaria will infect nearly a half billion people this year, with devastating worldwide human and economic consequences. Travelers (ourselves and our patients) are at risk for developing symptomatic malaria up to a year after they return, even if they have taken appropriate prophylactic medications. Because this is often not understood, these patients may be diagnosed late and poorly managed. Dengue transmission takes place in south Texas and its potential exists across all of the southernmost parts of the United States where Aedes aegypti is distributed– another poorly recognized fact that may lead to misdiagnosis and mismanagement of infected patients.

There is good news on the horizon with regard to decreasing the burden of these diseases either through control of mosquitoes or through chemoprophylaxis or vaccines for the individual diseases. Insecticide-treated bed nets are both cheap and highly effective. Vaccines are under development for malaria and for dengue hemorrhagic fever. And in the January issue of Science, a new approach to shortening the life cycle of Aedes aegypti is reported—a short-lived mosquito would die before dengue virus could complete the extrinsic incubation period required for an infected mosquito to transmit infection.

This article was the last I commissioned during my tenure as editor-in-chief of this journal, and I am delighted with the result—great information is accompanied by text boxes with advice for travelers, and the maps (in black and white in the print version of the journal) are reproduced in color on line at: www.cppah.com. Enjoy, and stay away from mosquitoes!