Two more cases of dengue fever have hit Miami-Dade, bringing total to 14 for the year
Health officials with Miami-Dade County announced two more locally transmitted cases of dengue fever on Monday, bringing the total number of local cases to 14 so far this year.
The announcement came about a month after the last warning from the county and represents an uptick in reported cases of the mosquito-borne tropical disease. It continues to spread rapidly through Latin America, raising concerns that the number of cases in Miami will continue to rise.
The Florida Department of Health in Miami-Dade County said the latest two cases are geographically linked to a travel-related case, but the department did not release additional details. Common symptoms of dengue virus include fever and one or more of the following: headache; eye pain; muscle, joint or bone pain; rash; nausea and vomiting; or unusual bleeding such as nose and gum bleeds.
The disease is spread through the bite of an Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same insect that also spreads the chikungunya and Zika viruses.
As of Nov. 11, the number of cases in the greater Americas region — 2,733,635 — was the largest in history, exceeding the epidemic year of 2015 by 13%, according to the most recent report by the Pan American Health Organization, a public health agency.
Carlos Espinal, director of the Global Health Consortium at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health at Florida International University, said last month that the Dengue virus is “out of proportion,” concentrated mostly in Brazil, El Salvador, Honduras, Belize, Colombia and Nicaragua. Espinal added that there is a lack of reliable information currently coming out of Venezuela.
“At this point, the general consensus is we are facing a very serious epidemic of dengue in the region at the moment,” Espinal said. “We are very close to Christmas time, and you know how people in Latin America travel a lot back to their countries of origin, where we have this epidemic.”
When people are infected by dengue for the first time, most of them are asymptomatic, Espinal said. Given that, the infection rate could be much higher than the disease, because public health experts don’t truly know how many cases we have, he added.
Miami-Dade has had the most cases of locally transmitted dengue in the state by far this year, with only Broward and Hillsborough reporting other cases — one in each county — according to the latest update from the Florida Department of Health, released mid-December.
Reports of international travel-associated cases were concentrated in travelers from Cuba, with 234 cases, according to the state health department. Travelers from the Dominican Republic represented the second-highest total, with 26 cases, the report said.
Espinal tied the surging rate of dengue virus infection to global climate change. Research has shown that global warming has allowed mosquitoes, as well as other disease-bearing insects, to proliferate by adapting to different seasons and migrating to warmer areas.
“Unfortunately, there is no vaccine for dengue and prevention revolves mostly around what people do to clean the potential breeding places around their houses and use mosquito repellent when they travel to these countries,” Espinal said.
This story was originally published December 23, 2019 at 5:30 PM.
