Dengue Incidence Rising Rapidly, With Warming Climate Giving Vector Species A Boost - NYT

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This year, dengue fever has ravaged Rio de Janeiro, infecting more than 75,000 people in Brazil’s Rio state, including Diego Hypólito, a world champion gymnast and gold-medal favorite in the Beijing Olympics this summer. More than 80 people in Rio have died from dengue.

Though most North Americans who receive a diagnosis of dengue fever were infected while traveling to countries where the disease is endemic, including Mexico, it has also struck residents of Hawaii and Texas who had not left American shores. And last summer a related mosquito-borne disease, chikungunya, afflicted more than 100 residents of a village in Italy, Castiglione di Cervia. The disease is not contagious; rather, it is passed from person to person through the bite of a virus-carrying mosquito.

Epidemiologists say that global warming is allowing the tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, a vector of both chikungunya and dengue fever, to survive in areas that were once too cold for it. This mosquito now thrives across southern Europe and even in France and Switzerland. All it takes is one infected traveler to bring the dengue virus home, where the bite of a resident tiger mosquito could transmit it to others.

The primary vector for dengue fever is Aedes aegypti, a daytime biter that is especially active during the early morning and late afternoon. (Unlike the Anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria, it is not active at night.) While dengue fever is not as serious a threat as malaria, which afflicts up to 500 million people and kills one million each year, both diseases have flourished since DDT, the pesticide that controlled mosquitoes more effectively and inexpensively than any other, fell out of favor in the 1960s. Uncontrolled urbanization and its accompanying population growth, along with inadequate water management systems, have also played a role in the spread of dengue fever.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/health/13brod.html