Time for something new to worry about.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning doctors and public health officials about a handful of locally acquired cases of malaria. There hasn’t been a case of malaria caught locally in the US in 20 years.
Typically, if Americans get sick with malaria they’ve caught it while traveling overseas in areas where malaria is more common. Malaria is a disease spread when the female anopheline mosquito feeds on a person with malaria and then feeds on another.
The mosquito can be found in certain regions in the US, but malaria is still rare in the US. Worldwide there are 240 million cases each year, 95% in Africa.
That could change with the climate crisis. Scientists have been warning people that malaria could become more common in the US as temperatures warm.
Malaria can also spread through blood transfusions, organ transplants, unsafe needle-sharing practices, and from mother to fetus. In the US, before the Covid-19 pandemic, there were about 2,000 cases of mostly travel-related malaria, according to the CDC.
In this case, four people in Florida and one person in Texas seem to have gotten exposed to the disease locally. The cases in the two states don’t seem to be related to each other, the CDC said.
The four cases in Florida are all in the same area, so there is active surveillance in the region to see if anyone else gets sick. Public health authorities are also monitoring and trying to control the local mosquito population.
In Texas, while only one case has been identified, public health officials are on the look out for others and they also trying to monitor the region’s mosquito population for the disease.
The CDC says that all the patients with malaria are in treatment and all of them are improving. The last time the US saw locally acquired cases was when eight people got sick in 2003 in Palm Beach County, Florida.
See here for the CDC’s alert. There’s no reason to panic, just take appropriate steps to reduce your risk of getting bitten by mosquitoes – bug spray is your friend – and watch out for malaria symptoms. We are living with the effects of climate change, and this is one of the things we are going to have to deal with. Slate and the Current has more.
Malaria is not new here. It was endemic into the 1940’s here, as was Yellow Fever. My Dad had malaria in Baytown as a kid. Mosquito control efforts made malaria rare.
I believe there may have been some stray cases reported to Houston Health Department over the past several decades which could not be traced to foreign travel, but am unsure whether such information is publicly accessible.