Bangladesh, June 29 -- Every year, Bangladesh greets dengue as though it were an uninvited guest. Every year, the guest arrives on schedule, occupies our hospitals, fills newspaper headlines, overwhelms local authorities, and then quietly departs with the retreat of the monsoon.

We mourn the dead, congratulate ourselves for surviving another season, and wait for the cycle to repeat.

The tragedy is not merely that dengue keeps returning.

The greater tragedy is that we continue to treat a predictable phenomenon as an emergency rather than a governance challenge that demands uninterrupted attention throughout the year.

The numbers this year should not comfort policymakers. At first glance, the official figures appear encouraging.

Hospi...