4 ms·
Although some posts suggest that the USA may experience malaria at some point in the future because of global warming; in actuality, the USA has already experie
by todd8 5y ago
Although some posts suggest that the USA may experience malaria at some point in the future because of global warming; in actuality, the USA has already experienced malaria.
In 1882, the range of malaria in the USA extended from the Canadian border on the north to southern border with Mexico on the south. The only states of the current 48 contiguous states unaffected were Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, Main, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Something like 41 states had malaria cases (the maps are a bit hard to read).
Approximately 375 cases acquired in the USA per 100,0000 population were reported in 1920.
Eradication efforts continued until the 1950s when the USA essentially became free of malaria. See [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.html https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...
- cmckn 5y agoI grew up in Alabama, and remember a few times a summer seeing the "mosquito truck" drive by, spraying pesticide as I played in the yard. I guess it works!
- brianwawok 5y agoI don't think we do it for malaria these days, just to reduce mosquito stings? Thinking about like mosquito sprays in Chicago...
- notacoward 5y agoAFAIK it's more about West Nile and EEE, maybe Zika and even others.
- warrenm 5y agoThough, incidentally, if you reduce/eliminate mosquitos carrying West Nile, Zika, etc ... you also reduce/eliminate the ones carrying Malaria :)
- tasty_freeze 5y agoWe had those growing up in suburban Chicago too -- in my case in the 70s. The trucks would only appear at dusk. We dumb kids thought the fog was a hoot so we would jump on our bikes and chase behind the truck hooting at the novelty, breathing in who knows what chemicals. I can still remember the smell.
- nicoburns 5y ago> breathing in who knows what chemicals Probably DDT. Not thwebest of ideas!
- whyenot 5y agoIn the 1970s? No, almost all use of DDT in the US ended in 1972.
- mNovak 5y agoI seem to recall this in the Midwest as recently as the 90s
- nerdponx 5y agoMy dad told me similar stories from midcentury New York.
- whyenot 5y agoIt was probably malathion, which is an organophosphate pesticide that is considered low toxicity, although it may be a carcinogen.
- Tostino 5y agoIn FL, we still have the mosquito truck end up coming by at least every other week.
- Fomite 5y agoThere's a reason the CDC is in Atlanta.
- hackerbabz 5y agoThis is something that has confused me for a long time. America definitely has mosquitoes (I’m from Washington, DC). How are there mosquitoes but no malaria?
- nicoburns 5y agoIt's only a few (4?) species of mosquito that carry malaria, out of hundreds of species in total.
- pjscott 5y agoIt's bizarrely hard to find good explanations of this! The National Malaria Eradication Program, between 1947 and 1951, cut down on malaria transmission enough that the parasite was driven locally extinct. They drained wetlands where mosquitoes bred, sprayed house interiors and mosquito-heavy areas with DDT on a very large scale, and generally engineered a very specific ecological disaster, depriving the parasite of the human hosts needed for part of their reproductive lifecycle. Without enough infected humans, the parasites died out. Crucially, they didn't need to get rid of all the mosquitoes to do this: they just needed to drive mosquito-to-human transmission low enough for long enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Malaria_Eradication_P...
- londons_explore 5y agoIf this were the complete story then just a single person coming back to the USA infected would lead to mass infection... Clearly that hasn't happened.
- Clewza313 5y agoMalaria does not spread from human to human, you need infected mosquitos in the mix. So you would need to get a breeding population of infected mosquitos biting humans for it to start spreading.
- im3w1l 5y agoOnly explanation I can think of is that the malaria from elsewhere is different somehow, worse adapted to US conditions.
- wincy 5y agoThe eradication efforts in the US included lots and lots of DDT. The Little House on the Prairie family caught malaria, and was so sick they almost died of dehydration because they couldn’t get down to the river to drink. https://littlehouseontheprairie.com/dr-george-a-tann-pioneer-physician-and-neighbor-to-the-ingalls/ https://littlehouseontheprairie.com/dr-george-a-tann-pioneer...