Climate change and rising temperatures are facilitating mosquito proliferation and their spread not only in tropical areas but also in regions where they have been rarely seen before. This has led to a surge in mosquito-borne diseases, posing a growing threat to global health. Flaviviruses, which rely on Aedes and Culex mosquitoes as primary carriers, are expanding across the globe. For instance, the number of dengue cases in the EU nearly doubled last year and Indiana recently reported the first West Nile virus case.

Additionally, the Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a species notorious for spreading dengue and Zika viruses, has been reported to be present in 13 EU countries. This includes regions like Paris, where the Olympic Games are scheduled for the end of July and where French authorities have been actively monitoring and trapping these mosquitoes.

These data highlight the urgent need for enhanced public health measures and increased surveillance to combat this rising threat. Monitoring and increase of public awareness are crucial for the mitigation of this phenomenon. More importantly, a protective vaccine could serve as an effective control measure against flaviviruses. For this reason, FLAVIVACCINE EU co-funded project aims to develop a vaccine through a new approach to protect against emerging flavivirus epidemic and pandemic threats.

The significant rise in flavivirus research over the past decade underscores the urgency of addressing mosquito-borne diseases. Thousand of scientific articles about flaviviruses have been published on PubMed, with an unprecedented peak of approximately 2,200 articles per year in both 2016 and 2017. This increase in research could be largely attributed to the Zika fever epidemic in South America, which spanned from spring 2015 to winter 2016, enhancing researcher’s and society’s preparedness for such threats. Even though the Zika epidemic has been declared over, we cannot let our guard down and further research is urgently needed to be prepared to possible epidemic or pandemic flavivirus risk.