The upward trend in dengue fever in the U.S. is still not being blamed — at least by scientists — on climate change.
A new study published in the journal Emerging and Infectious Diseases (May 2011) reported:
We found a dramatic increase in the number of hospitalizations for patients with dengue fever in the United States. This increase is not surprising considering that 1) the number of cases in disease-endemic regions has increased in recent years, and 2) a substantial number of travelers annually enter the United States from the tropics and subtropics.
Now while the researchers acknowledge that they didn’t have access to patient travel histories and so can’t attribute the disease incidence to travelers, it apparently did not even occur to them that that climate change, much less manmade climate change, was in any way connected to the dengue uptick.
This is in stark contrast to the quacks at the American Medical Association who recently could think of no reason other than manmade climate change for the increase in dengue.
All right, so maybe dengue might not be related to “climate change.”
But what about the recent outbreak of malaria in Wisconsin?
I’d like to see a good explanation for that one.
Furthermore, we need more research on the increased potency of hormone interrupters resulting from global warming.
IN reading this, I ponder the following:
1.) Americans have been traveling to the tropics for decades. Has there been any recent uptick in American travel habits that has them going to the tropics more frequently?
2.) People from the tropics have been traveling to America for decades. Has there … well, see #1
3.) How recent is the “recent” uptick in dengue cases in America? If it is recent, as in, say, the last ten years, is there a likewise increase in travel to and from the tropics to account for this?
4.) Is the recent uptick in dengue cases possibly attributable to something completely different than any cause guessed at so far? I know that traveling to Belieze, for example, USED to be a reason to get a full ration of malaria vaccinations, but Belieze has more or less managed their malaria issues and it is no longer necessary. Could it be that people traveling to the tropics in areas where dengue is no longer common are now eschewing these vaccination plans and are finding that dengue isn’t as eradicated as they originally thought?
5.) Could the pathogen for dengue fever be evolving to tolerate cooler climates?
6.) Has the mean temperature in the areas where the dengue upticks have been noticed actually risen enough to account for an increase in tropical disease (I suspect not).
7.) What areas are the dengue upticks being noticed? If they include northern states, then global warming cannot be the answer. If they include southern states, only, then it should not be hard to provide data showing that the climate there has changed enough to support a tropical disease that they could not previously support.
There is so much more to this than just choosing a cause from a hat. I would think that a panel like the AMA would have more of a duty to actually determine a cause of this uptick rather than just copping out liek they did. People’s lives and health are on the line. If the cause is other than climate change – which it is, duh – then it probably has a solution and we are not implementing said solution when we throw up our hands and blame climate change.
Those quacks at the AMA know where the money is, its in climate change. The next time an infectious disease is reported I’ll bet they will blame it on climate change. Everything is caused by climate change, the money proves it everytime.