For The First Time In 20 Years, Five People Have Picked Up Malaria on U.S. Soil
For the first time in 20 years, five people have picked up malaria on U.S. soil. On June 26, 2023, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory, announcing that over the last two months four people in Sarasota County, Fla, and one person in Cameron County, Texas, had developed the mosquito-borne illness.
Malaria was a disease once prevalent in the states but was later purged through the widespread spraying of the pesticide DDT. By 1951, malaria was eliminated within the U.S. border. As far as the rest of the world, the disease still remains with a reported 200 million cases per year and hundreds of thousands of deaths mainly in Africa.
This report marks the first cases since 2023 in the U.S. Though these cases have been reported, local transmission in the U.S. is rare, but not much to be worried about.
Experts are not worried now. "we've gotten really good at understanding transmission," says Johanna Daily, a parasitologist and physician at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. In addition to Daily's remarks, Sadie Ryan(a medical geographer at the University of Florida Gainesville) says:
"Because malaria is still a huge problem in many places, outbreaks in the United States, while rare, also aren’t unexpected. For this latest one, “it would be more surprising to me if it was far more cases or spread out across a lot of counties,”
For more updates about these cases visit: The CDC website
Cases in Florida and Texas
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