Recently, the Maricopa County Department of Public Health announced that it had confirmed a human case of dengue fever that is believed to have originated in an infected mosquito in Arizona.
The NCDHHS website states Dengue infection rarely occurs in the continental United States, showing primarily in tropical and subtropical countries.
The mosquito-borne illnesses most often found in North Carolina are West Nile virus (in humans and horses), eastern equine encephalitis (in humans and horses) and La Crosse encephalitis.
A study in the journal Frontiers in Public Health found that, thanks to climate change, the disease will “affect 60 percent of the world’s population by 2080.”
Individuals who fall ill from dengue fever can experience symptoms ranging from those similar to the flu to severe bleeding, organ failure and death. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the mosquito-borne illness annually infects 400 million and kills up to 40,000 people.
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