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Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne virus that infects 50–100 million people each year. Of these infections, 200,000–500,000 occur as the severe, life-threatening form of the disease, dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF). Large, unanticipated epidemics of DHF often overwhelm health systems. An understanding of the spatial–temporal pattern of DHF incidence would aid the allocation of resources to combat these epidemics. Here we examine the spatial–temporal dynamics of DHF incidence in a data set describing 850,000 infections occurring in 72 provinces of Thailand during the period 1983 to 1997. We use the method of empirical mode decomposition to show the existence of a spatial–temporal travelling wave in the incidence of DHF. We observe this wave in a three-year periodic component of variance, which is thought to reflect host–pathogen population dynamics^,. The wave emanates from Bangkok, the largest …