Every nation needs efficient laboratory-based, active disease surveillance systems, as well as public health officials who can react quickly and forcefully to stop epidemic spread before it starts. Because of their effects on vector survival and reproduction, biting and feeding habits, pathogen incubation and replication, and pathogen transmission among several hosts, vector-borne diseases are especially susceptible to climatic conditions. Growing interest in the environmental determinants of disease risk and the underlying ecological processes involved follows from new problems in managing the global rise of human illness burden resulting from emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. Genetic engineering to lower vector competence is the scientific algorithm used to modify vector populations, and so avoid the need for population suppression, research in vector biology. Until a workforce is educated in multidisciplinary sciences, including ecology and environmental sciences, imbalance in the overall research effort across biological disciplines engaged in vector-borne diseases is probably going to persist for some time.