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Dengue Fever Could Spread To United States

January 10, 2008

Dengue fever, a potentially deadly virus usually found in the tropics, could begin spreading widely in the U.S. as mosquitoes that transmit the disease move into more states, according to two leading epidemiologists.

The disease has already struck Hawaii, Texas and Puerto Rico after decades of absence in the U.S., Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and colleague David Morens write in the Jan. 9 Journal of the American Medical Association. They expect the threat to persist with increased air travel and urban development.

More than 760,000 cases of dengue and almost 20,000 cases of its deadly form, dengue hemorrhagic fever, were reported in the Americas in the first 11 months of last year, according to the Pan American Health Organization. With no specific treatments or proven vaccines to prevent the infection, an outbreak could overwhelm communities, Fauci and Morens said.

“This is an important problem, and our options for control and prevention at the moment are not very good,” said Morens, Fauci’s senior scientific adviser, in a phone interview today. “It’s easy to forget when a disease has been away for a long period of time.”

Dengue can be caused by four kinds of flavivirus, a family of viruses that also includes yellow fever and West Nile. The Aedes mosquitoes that transmit dengue have been around for hundreds of years and have re-emerged in greater numbers since efforts to prevent yellow fever waned in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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