Dengue Fever Reported In Arizona [Rare Tropical Disease]

ok....more info.....as usual...LOL!

While not usually fatal, it looks like the US could be expecting to see this disease become widespread.

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Federal health officials have identified the first sizable outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease in the U.S. in 55 years, in the Florida Keys. They say the southern U.S. is ripe for more.

Dengue fever is rarely fatal, though it can be. But it's often very unpleasant, and dangerous in people with impaired immune systems and other disorders. It's the most common mosquito-borne virus in the world, causing up to 100 million infections and 25,000 deaths each year.

Until this outbreak, Florida hadn't seen dengue fever since 1934. The U.S. as a whole hasn't seen many infections since 1945, except for occasional outbreaks along the Texas-Mexico border and a 2001 outbreak in Hawaii, imported from Tahiti.

By some estimates, several million Americans, mostly immigrants and the poor, have illnesses more commonly seen in the developing world, such as dengue fever and Chagas disease. The conditions often go unrecognized by American doctors.

Infectious disease specialists have been watching for more dengue in the southern U.S. Two species of mosquitos that carry the dengue virus are widespread in this country. Dengue is the most common cause of fevers among Americans returning from the Caribbean, South America and Asia. An infected traveler can touch off a local outbreak if bitten by a stateside mosquito when there's a lot of dengue virus in his or her blood.

Perhaps most ominous, cases of dengue fever elsewhere in this hemisphere – in the Caribbean, Central and South America – have jumped from around 1 million to 4.8 million since 2000. That's why the U.S. made dengue a reportable disease last year.

The Florida outbreak might have gone unnoticed if it hadn't been for that astute physician back in upstate New York. So the CDC is urging doctors all over the country to think dengue if they have another patient with the right combination of symptoms and travel history.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/05/20/127016467/dengue-fever-outbreak-in-florida-portends-a-growing-problem

If Dengue becomes common in the United States it wont' be because of illegals. The virus is transmitted via mosquito bites and blood product contamination for the most part. The mosquitoes that transmit it require a warmer climate than is generally found in the United States in order to keep the virus alive throughout the year (otherwise the colder seasons tend to get the population down far enough that Dengue can't use mosquitoes as a natural reservoir)

Indeed, if you've ever traveled abroad you'll realize that there's laughably little to this fear that illegals will bring nasty diseases into the US. You can pass through customs with little difficulty even if you've got a headache, high fever, and a persistent cough or sneeze.

Those symptoms could represent anything from a nasty cold all the way up to early stage Ebola Zaire Hemorrhagic Fever and it's cheerful 90+% mortality rate.

Reality based politics are a lot more useful than the chicken-little sort.

I am more concerned about what is happening with the spread of tuberculosis in Mexico among its poor and their ability to spread it in the US than I am about dengue fever (unless it should mutate into something more fatal).

Tuberculosis is fatal, and there is limited to no prevention or treatment.

I will have to agree with Killfile, that due to US citizens traveling across the globe and being allowed re-entry without a health screening then disease control is not limited to what is happening with the influx of millions of illegals from Mexico.

We have already seen "bird flu" and "swine flu"...and there is no telling what is waiting to be next.

Europe saw The Black Plague and there was a worldwide flu epidemic in the early 1900s. In despite of all of the advances in medicine, and possibly because of the advances in medicine and worldwide travel, there will more of the same in the world's future.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis

http://www.pulitzercenter.org/openitem.cfm?id=2378

death rates of TB around the world...

http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?d=MDG&f=seriesRowID%3A647

......global deaths via various diseases..........

http://www.globalhealthfacts.org/