From mpox to bird flu and beyond, multiple infectious disease outbreaks flared up around the world this year.
Dengue cases soared
It was a record year for dengue fever, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes. The Americas have amassed about 12.7 million cases as of early December. That’s about 90 percent of the roughly 14 million cases recorded around the world. Cases in the Americas alone are also more than double the previous global record of 5.3 million cases reported by the WHO just last year.
Climate change, El Niño and urbanization may have played a part in the massive outbreak, according to the WHO.
Rising temperatures may have boosted dengue transmission by around 18 percent in the Americas and Asia compared with what levels would have been in a world without warming, scientists reported in a paper posted this year at medRxiv.org. Depending on how high the average global temperature gets by 2050, transmission could become 40 to 57 percent higher on average than expected without climate change.
Mpox sparked a global emergency
A surge of mpox cases across Central Africa reached a tipping point that prompted the World Health Organization to declare the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern in August (SN: 9/7/24 & 9/21/24, p. 6).
Mpox, which can cause fever, muscle aches and a hallmark rash with painful pus-filled lesions, has long been a problem in parts of Africa. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where the first case was reported in 1970, is the center of the current outbreak. This year, the virus that causes mpox spread to previously unaffected countries including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.
As of early December, there have been nearly 60,000 confirmed and suspected cases in 20 countries and 60 deaths in 2024. Children have been particularly hard hit.
Since…
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