Malaria still kills more than 600,000 people a year, and dengue, spread by two mosquitoes now found on every inhabited continent, has no global case count at all. There is no single independent, openly sourced map of where the world's disease-carrying mosquitoes actually are. So we built a first one, and added a preliminary model of where warming could take the invasive tiger mosquito by 2070. It is a reason for caution, not reassurance.
Malaria still kills more than 600,000 people a year, almost all of them in sub-Saharan Africa, and a great many of them children. Dengue, spread by two mosquitoes that now live on every inhabited continent, has no global case count at all. If you want to know where the world's disease-carrying mosquitoes actually are, and where a warming climate is likely to take them, there is no single, independent, openly sourced map to look at. So we built a first one.
The Mosquito Intelligence Atlas is a public baseline assembled entirely from primary open data: 712,112 georeferenced occurrence records for the seven principal vector species from GBIF, the World Health Organization's modelled disease-burden estimates, and World Bank population figures, across 217 countries. It is preliminary, and we say so plainly. It is not a validated risk model. It is the honest starting point that a field dominated by research funded and run far from where the vectors live has not produced.
What the numbers say
In the latest reporting year, the WHO estimates roughly 281 million malaria cases and 609,930 deaths, concentrated in 108 endemic countries. Nigeria alone accounts for about a quarter of the global total, and Nigeria together with the Democratic Republic of the Congo exceed a third of it. For the Aedes-borne arboviruses (dengue, Zika, chikungunya) we map competent-vector presence rather than cases, because the global case data does not exist: both Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus are recorded within the transmission-plausible climatic band in 103 countries, with a further 61 hosting one of the two. Forty-nine countries host at least four of the seven principal vectors. Those are the multi-disease hotspots.
The question the literature avoids
As gene-drive, genetically-modified-release and Wolbachia programmes engineer Aedes aegypti populations downward, the obvious follow-on question is which competent vector moves into the ground that control clears. The invasive Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, is the strongest candidate. Research on its spread is growing faster than any engineered-intervention theme in the literature, yet intervention effort concentrates overwhelmingly on aegypti. That gap is the editorial territory of the Atlas.
A preview of where warming leads
Alongside the map, we have now added a preliminary environmental-suitability model: a machine-learning estimate, built on WorldClim climate data and a high-emissions 2070 projection, of where the three priority vectors could find suitable conditions today and in fifty years. It points, unambiguously, to a northward and upward expansion of Aedes albopictus into parts of Europe, the Americas and East Asia that have historically been too cold to hold it.
Here is the part we will not soften. A model like this is a climatic envelope, not a calibrated risk score. It excludes land use, human density and mosquito control, and it should be read as a reason for caution, not reassurance. A low or blank value on the map is not a safety signal. Very often it means an area is simply under-surveyed, not that the mosquito is absent, and absence of evidence is never evidence of absence. Where a competent vector is plausible, the honest advice is to protect against bites rather than to assume a repellent alone will do. Long-lasting insecticidal nets remain the frontline defence against the night-biting Anopheles that carry malaria, and for the day-biting Aedes, physical barriers and removing standing water matter more than any spray.
Why an independent bureau
Every figure in the Atlas traces to a named source with its caveats attached, and those caveats travel with the data into every export and every citation. The maps carry no invented numbers and no claim we cannot defend. That discipline is the whole point. The world does not need another confident dashboard. It needs a truth-oriented reference that shows people the danger plainly, keeps saying so, and updates as the evidence does.
The full data, the sources, and the downloadable tables are at the Mosquito Intelligence Atlas.