Tropical dengue fever may threaten US - report*

08 Jan 2008 21:00:30 GMT
Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON, Jan 8 (Reuters) - Dengue fever -- a tropical infection that
usually causes flu-like illness -- may be poised to spread across the
United States and urgent study is needed, health officials said on Tuesday.

Cases of the sometimes deadly mosquito-borne disease have been reported
in Texas and this may be the beginning of a new trend, said Dr. Anthony
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, and his senior scientific adviser, Dr. David Morens.

A warming climate and less-than-stellar efforts to control mosquitoes
could accelerate its spread northwards, they cautioned.

"Widespread appearance of dengue in the continental United States is a
real possibility," they wrote in a commentary in the Journal of the
American Medical Association.

"Worldwide, dengue is among the most important reemerging infectious
diseases, with an estimated 50 to 100 million annual cases, 500,000
hospitalizations and, by World Health Organization estimates, 22,000
deaths, mostly in children."

They compared dengue to West Nile virus, which first appeared in New
York in 1999 and has now spread to the entire continental United States,
Canada and Mexico. West Nile killed at least 98 people in the United
States last year.

Both viruses are carried by mosquitoes. Dengue can be carried by the
Aedes albopictus or Asian tiger mosquito -- first seen in 1985 in the
United States -- as well as the more common Aedes aegypti species.

Most people infected with a dengue virus have no symptoms or a mild
fever. It can cause minor bleeding from the nose or gums, but can also
cause severe fever and shock and without treatment can kill.

"The combined effects of global urbanization and increasing air travel
are expected to make dengue a growing international health problem for
the foreseeable future," Fauci and Morens wrote. (Reporting by Maggie
Fox; editing by Julie Steenhuysen and Todd Eastham)