Five Americans (four in Florida and one in Texas) have contracted malaria within the nation’s boundaries in the past month.
That’s quite unusual, at least for this century; malaria remained a constant scourge in the US, particularly in the Southeast, until the 1950s.
Challenges And Strategies Of Malaria Resurgence Threat
Since then, many of the factors that contribute to the spread of malaria haven’t changed significantly.
Many areas of the nation are still home to the Anopheles mosquitoes that transmit malaria, and states that see a lot of visitors from countries where the disease is endemic continue to experience warm, moist weather that encourages mosquito breeding.
However, malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the United States are incredibly rare. There have only been a few instances of local malaria transmission in the US since the turn of the century.
But in other parts of the world, the illness continues to be a significant destructor: Malaria caused 240 million infections and 627,000 fatalities in 85 countries throughout Africa, Asia, and parts of South America in just 2020.
These instances are occurring at a time when other insect-borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent worldwide, in the midst of a hot wave, and a wildfire outbreak, all of which together demonstrate the health hazards associated with climate change.
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Vulnerabilities In Malaria Prevention
It’s natural to worry if the US is in danger of returning to its status as a malaria hotspot.
According to Colin Carlson, a global change biologist at Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Science and Security who has led research on the rapidly expanding range of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in Africa, something would have to go very wrong for malaria to become endemic in the United States.
The country’s public health infrastructure, which Americans depend on to detect and contain invasive infectious diseases, has recently demonstrated that it is much more vulnerable than many believed.
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