The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning to doctors on Tuesday to be on the look out for cases of dengue. A surge in dengue cases globally is raising the risk that people could catch the disease in the US.
The number of people who develop the mosquito-borne disease has been increasing globally as the world’s climate warms due to the human-made climate crisis. The infected mosquitos that spread the disease, the Aedes aegypti, and sometimes Aedes albopictus, mosquitoes like warmer and wetter weather.
Generally, dengue had been relatively rare in the continental US with most people getting sick after having traveled to popular destinations overseas where the disease is more common. So far this year, a higher-than-expected number of dengue cases have been identified among US travelers, with 745 cases in records kept through June 24, the CDC said.
In 2023, 1,829 travel-associated cases were reported by US travelers, the highest number of travel-associated cases since dengue became reportable in the US in 2010, according to the CDC. Twenty-three countries reported outbreaks last year with more than 5 million cases reported to the World Health Organization and 4,000 deaths in the Americas alone.
Over the years there have been a handful of outbreaks in locally-transmitted cases in states with warmer climates and habitat friendly to the kind of mosquito that spread dengue like Florida, Texas, Hawaii and Arizona. California reported its first locally transmitted case in Pasadena last year.
Tuesday’s warning from the CDC says that the number of global infections in 2024 have been the highest on record. Cases in the Americas have already exceeded the highest number ever recorded in a single year, with more than 9.7 million people getting sick with dengue; that’s twice as many cases in all of 2023.
Leave a Reply