Malaria grabs headlines, but U.S. residents are more likely to encounter West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses
That’s because mosquitoes can carry a range of microbes that infect humans, including four species of malaria parasites. Members of the genus Plasmodium, these malaria-causing microbes hitchhike on female mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles and get transferred to humans when those insects bite us. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, malaria killed 627,000 people worldwide in 2020. The U.S.
How common are mosquito-borne diseases in the U.S.? Overall, levels of mosquito-borne disease in the country are quite low and have been since the mid-20th century, when malaria was effectively eradicated through a nationwide campaign to spray insecticides and otherwise kill mosquitoes. West Nile disease is “different for me than things like dengue and malaria because it is a spillover disease,” Ryan says. For both dengue and malaria, mosquitoes get infected when they have a blood meal from an infected person. With West Nile, “humans are the ‘dead-end’ hosts; we’re not the reservoir,” she says. “And so the management for West Nile has to be very different.”
Louisiana has reported one case of eastern equine encephalitis this year. The CDC has never received reports of more than 40 infections of this virus in a year, and fewer than 200 people have caught it since 2003. This pathogen has a complicated life cycle: it is mainly transmitted among birds by a particular mosquito, although multiple other species of mosquitoes can pass it to horses and humans as dead-end hosts.
“They can present in a lot of similar ways to each other,” says Shelby Lyons, an epidemiologist at the CDC. “These diseases can be difficult to identify: their clinical signs and symptoms can mimic a lot of other diseases, and arboviruses aren’t always at the top of mind for clinicians.” Lyons says that infection rate is in line with previous years. “Overall, nationally, looking at the data, it really seems to not be very different from what we’ve traditionally seen,” she says. “It looks about on par with what we would expect.”
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