XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, sac.politics, talk.politics.guns
XPost: talk.politics.medicine
On 08 Jan 2022, Molly Bolt <
mollythebolt666@gmail.com> posted some news:
eb9654cb-508b-44a1-9875-bc689527c793n@googlegroups.com:
Stupid fucking Democrats. They are streaming in illegal aliens from
other countries infected with Malaria and they can't figure it out...?
The U.S. does not routinely track mosquitoes that spread malaria
"because we haven't been worried about them," one expert said. Concerns
over the insects, however, are growing.
A ninth case of malaria diagnosed in a person who had not traveled out
of the U.S. has experts on alert — and calling for more surveillance of
the mosquitoes that spread the illness.
"The time to think about the next mosquito-borne disease is not when we
find a sick person. It's now," said Dan Markowski, technical adviser to
the American Mosquito Control Association, a nonprofit organization representing groups that monitor mosquito activity.
While public health officials maintain that Americans' risk of
contracting malaria remains quite low, some experts say the country
should increase its surveillance of the specific type of insects
responsible for malaria spread: Anopheles mosquitoes.
"We have not been tracking them in the United States because we haven’t
been worried about them," said Dr. Photini Sinnis, an expert at the
Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute in Baltimore.
It's been decades since U.S. health authorities have had malaria on
their radar. Malaria, a potentially deadly illness that causes flu-like symptoms such as fever, body aches and extreme chills, sickened
thousands of Americans in the early part of the 20th century. The
disease spreads via a parasite that gets transmitted to a person through
a mosquito bite.
Insecticides and elimination of standing water where mosquitoes like to
breed wiped out the mosquito-borne illness from the U.S. in the early
1950s.
Since then, the vast majority of cases in the country — more than 2,000
each year — have been among people returning from travel abroad. A case
of locally acquired malaria hadn't been reported in two decades until
now.
2023 has been different. This year, nine cases of malaria have been
detected in people infected on U.S. soil: one in Texas and seven in
Florida announced earlier this year, and one case detected in Maryland
last Friday. The cases are not believed to be linked state-to-state, and
no deaths have occurred.
"We've had these cases in the past because these mosquitoes are here.
It's a low probability of events, but they can happen," said Sinnis,
also a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
"But when they start happening more frequently, you say, 'Maybe things
are changing. Maybe this is here to stay.'"
Sinnis said the U.S. needs more data and more time to know for sure.
"Next summer will be interesting. The next five summers will be
interesting," she said.
Counties across the U.S. routinely trap and study mosquitoes for their
ability to transmit disease. Experts usually zero in on Culex
mosquitoes, which transmit West Nile virus. That mosquito-borne illness
is most concerning to public health officials because it infects
thousands of people each year. Other bugs found in traps — moths, flies
and other types of mosquitoes — are usually tossed aside because they do
not cause widespread illness.
Anopheles mosquitoes that can carry the parasites responsible for
malaria spread are often discarded, said Markowski, of the American
Mosquito Control Association, because local health authorities don’t
have the funding to study the ones that so rarely cause disease in the
U.S.
Still, "we've always had these vectors here," said Dr. Jill Weatherhead,
an assistant professor of tropical medicine and infectious diseases at
Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "We need to make sure that those mosquito control programs reporting surveillance are strong enough to
prevent ongoing transmission."
Dr. Monica Parise, a medical epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency is exploring the idea of
increasing surveillance of Anopheles mosquitoes.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/mosquitoes-spread-malaria-aren t-tracked-us-rcna100936
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