Dengue Fever No Longer Just A Visitor To Florida Keys

[steve2470]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/03/12/174142169/dengue-fever-no-longer-just-a-visitor-to-florida-keys

If you're heading down to the Florida Keys for spring break, pack bug spray and long-sleeve shirts.

After a 60-year hiatus, the mosquito-borne illness dengue fever has now officially re-established itself there.

People infected during a recent outbreak in Florida didn't catch the virus abroad but rather got a strain that's unique to Key West, virologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Disease.

The virus has been circulating around the Key West population for at least two years, the researchers say, and it has evolved its own genetic fingerprint, distinct from dengue in Central America and the Caribbean.

[NMDemDist2]

1. i bet global warming has something to do with this migration too. n/t

[SoCalDem]

2. When I lived in Panama, we always feared the deadly Dengue

and had to catch every mosquito that bit us.. All of us kids had a folded up piece of waxed paper just for that purpose.. The mosquitoes were HUGE so you always felt them ...usually before they chomped on you..

Of course we got fogged with DDT twice a day, so no one I knew ever got it, but we still worried about it..

[KamaAina]

3. Dengue on the mainland? Yikes!

The small town of Ke'anae on Maui had an outbreak a few years ago. The whole town was blocked off so only residents could get in and out.