"An epidemic of dengue fever in India is fostering a growing sense of alarm even as government officials here have publicly refused to acknowledge the scope of a problem that experts say is threatening hundreds of millions of people, not just in India but around the world," the New York Times reports. Dengue is endemic in half of the world's countries and continuing to spread, experts say, according to the newspaper. In India's capital, New Delhi, "where areas of standing water contribute to the epidemic's growth, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways," the newspaper writes. With officials citing 30,002 cases of dengue in India through October, "a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded for all of 2011," several experts say the true number of infections in the country is in the tens of millions, the New York Times notes.