A $3.5 million grant will help UF researchers identify viruses, limit infectious disease spread

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It feels like your bones are splintering.

Dengue, also known as break-bone fever, is an illness prevalent in areas of the world with blistering temperatures and juicy humidity. In severe cases, the viral infection causes death. The best treatment is not to catch it in the first place; the second-best is to try to prevent its spread.

Now, researchers from the UF College of Veterinary Medicine and UF College of Public Health and Health Professions plan to use a $3.5-million grant to do just that — for dengue fever, yellow fever and other arboviruses, a class of diseases spread by arthropods like flies and ticks. This is the first grant funded by the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium that the University of Florida has received and will support researchers in their goal of developing diagnostics to ultimately detect and survey for new, emerging infectious agents in Florida.

“The best defense is a good offense,” said Rhoel Dinglasan, Ph.D., a professor in the UF Department of Infectious Diseases and Immunology. “We know that surveillance systems work. We need to do it abroad before it comes home.”

Surveillance systems are a time-tested approach to combating infectious diseases that affect public health. Better understanding transmission is key to grasping how diseases ebb and flow. Another factor is the reality that there are many previously unidentified and little-understood viruses among people. The key is to identify a way of testing them.

“I think the intriguing question is: Are these little known, or unidentified, viruses causing illnesses that we don’t recognize or know how to treat?” said John Lednicky, Ph.D., a professor in the PHHP Department of Environmental and Global Health and a member of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. “And to understand that, we have to identify them, understand what makes these viruses jump into humans, or from humans to animals and, to me, that's the key to preventing outbreaks. All animals, just like humans, harbor viruses, some of which may be dangerous to humans and vice versa.”

Travel spiked after the COVID-19 pandemic, Dinglasan said.

“A lot of folks are traveling around, and a lot of these pathogens then hitchhike on humans,” he said. “It’s a human. A mosquito did not fly here from a country where dengue is endemic and make its home in Florida.”

In 2025, there were about 62 local cases of dengue fever documented in Florida.

The disease spreads by mosquitos. When these insects bite someone, it doesn’t matter if patient zero is asymptomatic — the mosquito still becomes a vector of disease, serenely flying through the air toward its next victim.

To better see how the disease spreads via insects and humans, researchers plan to study insect behaviors abroad, helping them analyze how the pathogens move within populations across Kenya and Uganda. Then, they can better conceptualize how viruses cross borders.

“Some of the other pathogens we’re studying have an animal reservoir, which is especially concerning for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as it could kill Florida cattle,” Dinglasan said.

Dinglasan has been working with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research-Africa since October, where he designed the study’s collection procedures — everything from the nets used to catch mosquitoes and flies, to pulling ticks from animals. Animals these disease-carrying insects target include, of course, people and cattle, but also civets, green monkeys, baboons, warthogs, goats and sheep.

“Many people predict a lot of the new viruses that will continue to emerge in humans are in Africa and in Asia,” Lednicky said. “Being able to grow viruses in a lab from specimens collected from animals helps us avoid limited molecular testing, where you often lose out on discerning previously unidentified or mutated versions of the virus.”

Having a limited sample of viruses to test against means clinicians might not know which virus is sickening someone. Another danger is that clinicians might detect residual traces of the virus, which do not always provide the full picture. The best option is to develop a robust understanding of how viruses are moving — and to have virus samples to test against.

Tracking pockets of disease means that when a patient turns up in a clinic with a fever and few other symptoms, clinicians will be able to deduce what is spreading in their area. They will also know what needs to be targeted to eliminate its spread — whether ticks, mosquitoes or something else.

“As an example, imagine these flies are around a butcher: sampling the meat that the butcher is butchering and sampling the butcher. The butcher might sneeze. It gets on the fly and we collect the insect,” Dinglasan said.

Flies, after all, go where other vectors don’t.

“Dead or alive, human or not, a fly will sample it head to tail,” he said.

Knowing where disease hotspots are would allow for more precise transmission control, he said. No one can spray insects everywhere all the time.

One of the deadliest diseases the team plans to tackle is the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus. It’s categorized as a Bio-Safety Level 4, which is reserved for pathogens with no effective treatments or vaccines. The World Health Organization classifies it as a high-priority pathogen posing a threat to public health.

It’s scary because it can travel via tick on animals that are routinely herded across borders while showing no signs of illness. The disease is found in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

Studying how even non-lethal diseases travel helps pinpoint treatment, too.

“People will come in sick, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, yeah, I have malaria, give me some anti-malarial pills,’ and then you die because you weren’t sick with malaria,” Dinglasan said. “You were sick with something else, right? People don't always know what to test for, and that's the biggest problem. If you don’t know what to test for, you don’t have a diagnostic design.”

Back in 1999, Dinglasan visited Kenya for his graduate work. It was his first time in Africa. He stayed for three and a half months.

“I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life,” he said.