On Superbug, Maryn McKenna writes: Disease + mosquitoes + climate change = Uh-oh. Excerpt:
A few days ago, health authorities in southern France announced that they’d found two cases of the mosquito-borne disease chikungunya in the Var, in Provence. Chikungunya is a nasty disease; it causes high fevers and severe joint pain, and its name comes from words in a Mozambiquan dialect that describe victims being “bent over” in spasms.
Chikungunya perks along steadily in the tropics — Africa, Asia, India — and every year, a few travelers arrive back in the temperate zones suffering from infections they picked up on holiday (e.g., into Europe from the Maldives and from Thailand, both in 2009).
There was something unusual about the cases in the Var, though. Neither of the victims, 12-year-old girls who are friends and live in the town of Frejus, had been outside France. They were the first locally acquired cases of chikungunya that France has ever recorded.
And they happened to follow, by two weeks, the discovery of France’s first locally acquired cases of dengue, which is, after malaria, the most serious mosquito-borne disease in the world.
So, on the one hand: Few cases, everyone treated, nobody died.
On the other hand: An early warning signal worth listening to.
