Florida confirms a death from dengue as the state struggles with one of its worst recent outbreaks

NEW YORK (AP) — Florida is experiencing one of its worst surges of dengue fever in decades, and the toll now includes a death.

The Florida Department of Health confirmed the death Friday, though it didn’t provide further details. It’s one of more than 130 locally acquired dengue cases reported so far this year in Hillsborough County, which typically sees only a handful.

“This is wildly unusual for us,” said Chris Wilkerson, a spokesperson for the county.

The Tampa Bay Times first reported the death, described as an elderly Tampa woman who died Sept. 4.

Dengue is caused by a virus spread by a type of warm weather mosquito that is expanding its geographic reach because of climate change, experts say. The current Florida outbreak is likely due to recent weather conditions that allowed the virus-spreading mosquitoes to multiply.

For decades in the U.S., most reported dengue cases were in travelers infected in other countries, along with locally acquired cases in Puerto Rico.

But in 2009-2010, Key West, Florida, reported the first dengue cases acquired in the continental U.S. outside of the Texas-Mexico border since 1945.

The state’s largest number — nearly 200 — was reported in 2023. But this year’s total so far already ranks second, with 152 cases of locally acquired dengue cases so far, according to the Florida Department of Health.

Many infected people don’t get sick, meaning the number of cases reported in an outbreak can be an undercount of the real number of infections.

But some experience headache, fever and flu-like symptoms. Severe cases can cause serious bleeding, shock and death.

Across the world, more than 2.2 million infections have been reported so far this year, according to the World Health Organization, and nearly 1,200 have died.

In the United States, there have been nearly 1,500 locally acquired U.S. cases, most of them in Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The current outbreak is centered just north of Tampa, and workers have been spraying to kill mosquitoes day and night. They also have been checking properties for pooled water, including in tires, where mosquitoes might breed, said Paolo Pecora, senior environmental scientist for Hillsborough County Mosquito Management Services.

Recent sampling of mosquitoes has not been finding the virus, a sign that the likelihood of new infections is waning, Pecora said.

Outbreaks can start when a person travels, gets infected and then is bitten back in the U.S. by a mosquito capable of spreading the virus. It can mushroom from there, said Michael von Fricken, a University of Florida associate professor of environmental and global health.

Given the recurring abundance of those kinds of mosquitoes in Florida, the threat of dengue is not likely to tail off, he added. “I do think it’s going to be somewhat the new normal,” he said.

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