NEW YORK – The United States has seen five cases of malaria spread by mosquitos in the last two months — the first time there’s been local spread in 20 years.
There were four cases detected in Florida and one in Texas, according to a health alert issued Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The four Florida cases are in Southwest Florida, Sarasota County specifically. A local medical expert says the urgency behind the public health alert is because scientists are 100% sure, the malaria didn’t come from overseas.
Malaria is caused by a parasite that spreads through mosquito bites. Infected people can suffer fever, chills and flu-like illness. If it goes untreated, infected people can develop severe complications and die. The largest death toll in recent years has been seen in children in sub-Saharan Africa.
“What this Health Alert is stating is that we now have what’s called endemic malaria here in Florida. That means they found malaria cases in people who have not had foreign travel, meaning they picked up malaria from a mosquito in the state of Florida,” Chad Neilsen of UF Health said.
Neilsen is the director of accreditation and infection prevention at UF Health. He says because there is no vaccine, or no protection from being infected, CDC officials are aggressively trying to find the diseases origin.
“So, when we have a cluster of cases, it means more than one case in a certain area. They’re going to be searching for the source of those mosquitos. So they’re going to be looking at ponds, they’re going to be looking at standing water, you know, reserviors off the side of the road in ditches,” Neilsen said.
Health officials are warning doctors, especially those in southern states where the weather is more friendly to the tropical mosquito that spreads malaria, to be aware of the possibility of infection. They also should think about how to access the IV drug that is the first-line treatment for severe malaria in the United States, the CDC said.
“Most people are going to be at risk for malaria, if they’ve never had it before, right. So malaria has largely been a forgotten disease here, at least in the United States. But for other parts of the world, Africa, South America, it is still very much a real thing and the leading killer of people,” Neilsen said.
If you’ve lived in Florida for a while, you know how to limit the amount of mosquitos around your house, by eliminating or pouring out any standing water and wearing bug repellant. With our temperatures on the rise, doctors say it’s more important than ever to heed that same advice for the rest of the summer
The CDC said that the people who were diagnosed received treatment and “are improving.”
About 2,000 U.S. cases of malaria are diagnosed each year — the vast majority in travelers coming from countries where malaria commonly spreads.
Since 1992, there've been 11 outbreaks involving malaria from mosquitoes in the U.S. The last one occurred in 2003 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where eight cases were reported
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