Latin America and the Caribbean are set for their worst dengue season on record this year, as global warming and the El Niñothe Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) warned yesterday Thursday.
In less than three months in 2024, authorities in this region have already recorded more than 3.5 million cases and around a thousand deaths from the viral disease, which is transmitted to humans through the bite of female mosquitoes that transmit the virus.
These numbers cause “concern, as the cases are three times more than those recorded at the same time in 2023, a record year with more than 4.5 million cases”, emphasized during a press conference Dr. Zarbas Barbosa, the director of PAOU, regional branch of the World Health Organization (WHO).
2024 will “likely” be “the worst dengue season on record” in the Americas, he added.
The viral disease causes a high fever and, in rarer cases, takes a more severe form, causing hemorrhagic fever. Deaths are generally very rare, not exceeding 0.01% of all cases.
Very common in countries with a warm climate, the disease spreads mainly in urban and semi-urban zones, where between 100 and 400 million cases are recorded each year, according to the WHO. Some 4 billion people, about half the world’s population, live in areas where they are at risk of becoming infected, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the main US federal health agency.
The increase in the number of cases is verified in all the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, but above all in three states of the so-called southern cone: Brazil (81%), Paraguay (6%) and Argentina (3, 4%), where 92% of total cases and 87% of deaths were recorded.
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