Malaria Is On The Rise Among American Travelers

More than 2,000 people in the U.S. return from visits abroad with malaria every year, a new report says. The report supports data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicating that malaria is on the rise in the U.S., and should serve as a warning to travelers who visit countries where the disease is common, experts said.  “Malaria, in the world right now, is still the leading cause of death by parasitic disease,” said the study’s lead researcher, Diana Khuu, an epidemiologist at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s important for everyone to take preventative measures,” she said.  Over recent decades, aggressive interventions in countries with malaria-carrying mosquitoes have reduced new cases of the disease and, more important, deaths from it. Still, in 2015, 438,000 people died from the disease worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, endemic malaria, meaning malaria transmitted by local mosquito populations, was eliminated in the early 1950s. But reports of travelers returning to the U.S. with cases have recently been on the rise. In the 1970s, data from the CDC’s malaria surveillance system estimated the total number of confirmed cases per year to be in the low hundreds. Since then, that number has steadily climbed to between 1,500 and 2,000.  These numbers come from physicians and lab clinicians, ...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news