Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

Unseen Suburban Danger: Children Dying of Mosquito-Borne Diseases

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James Jordan (CC), Flickr

James Jordan (CC), Flickr

Every once in a while a scientific paper pops up in my stream that makes me think, not Cool, or Ick, but: Wow, I had no idea. I’ve just read one, published last month in Pediatrics, which definitely falls into the last category. My extreme abbreviation of the findings: On average, more than 100 children and teens each year are made dangerously ill or paralyzed by infections carried by mosquitoes, and two die.

I think of mosquito-borne infections in the United States — that is, primarily West Nile virus, and the much less well-known La Crosse virus and Eastern equine encephalitis virus — as a problem of adults. I had no clue they were so dangerous to children. (And if I didn’t, most of you probably didn’t either.)

Here’s a more detailed breakdown.

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An Old Disease Returns: Dengue Is in Florida and May Be Heading North

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This month, Slate has been running an intermittent series on pandemics under the guidance of new science editor Laura Helmuth. The latest entry in the series is one that I wrote (my first time writing for Slate, which is exciting). It’s about the under-appreciated threat to the United States of a disease that we barely think about: the mosquito-borne illness called dengue, formerly known as “breakbone fever.”

Dengue was once endemic in the United States. When I started researching it for this piece, I discovered a whole series of historical outbreaks I knew nothing about: Charleston, SC, 1828; Savannah, Ga., 1850; Austin, 1885; Galveston, 1897; most of Louisiana, 1922; Miami, 1934. Dengue was not eliminated here until the government undertook mass mosquito-eradication programs in the 1940s, because mosquito-borne illnesses were making so many military members so sick that the toll was hampering the war effort. (Public-health history buffs: Those were the campaigns that gave rise to the CDC, which grew out of a government agency called the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas.)

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