Via ScienceDaily.com: Dengue virus circulating between monkeys and mosquitoes could emerge to cause human outbreaks. Excerpt:
More than a thousand years ago, somewhere in Southeast Asia, a fateful meeting occurred between a mosquito-borne virus that infected mainly monkeys and a large, susceptible group of humans.
The result: the world's first outbreak of dengue fever.
Today, dengue virus -- which can produce high fever, excruciating joint pain and even death -- has spread throughout tropical Asia, Africa and South America, and in 2008 it re-appeared in the Florida Keys. It could be even more widespread along the U.S. Gulf Coast but there is no surveillance in place to detect it.
Annually dengue strikes about 100 million people and causes an estimated 50,000 deaths, thriving in the urban environments infested by Aedes aegypti, the mosquito species primarily responsible for human dengue transmission.
Meanwhile, the virus' forest-dwelling counterpart -- known as "sylvatic dengue" -- continues to flourish in Southeast Asia and West Africa, cycling between non-human primates and the mosquitoes that feed on them.
Since the 1970s, sylvatic dengue has received very little scientific attention -- a situation that badly needs to be remedied, according to the authors of "Fever from the forest: Prospects for the continued emergence of sylvatic dengue virus and its impact on public health," an article published online June 13 in Nature Reviews Microbiology.
