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POISONING CATS?
Just to put the potential risk in perspective, here are two excerpts from
New Scientist magazine of an interview with Paul Reiter, chief entomologist at the US government's dengue research lab in Puerto Rico. **New Scientist vol 167 issue 2257 - 23 September 2000, page 41 First of all, most people think of malaria as a tropical disease. That's completely wrong. Until very recently it was widespread in Europe and North America. In the 1880s, virtually all the US was malarious, and even parts of Canada. When the organisation I work for, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was founded in 1946, its principal mission was to eradicate malaria from the US. In Europe, the disease was endemic as far north as Norway, Sweden and Finland. In the 1920s, epidemics killed hundreds of thousands in the Soviet Union, right up to the Arctic Circle. One of the last European countries to be freed of the disease was Holland. That was in 1970. .... Why did malaria decline in the northern hemisphere? In some places, it was drainage schemes, insecticides, anti-malarial medicines, and so on. But the most important factors were complex changes in the way people lived, which reduced their contact with mosquitoes. You can see this even today. For example, Texans love air conditioning. They live for much of the year with all their doors and windows closed. ** and from New Scientist vol 163 issue 2204 - 18 September 1999, page Page 13 ** In Turkey, malaria was almost eliminated by 1989. But a major irrigation project in the southeast of the country caused cases to jump nearly tenfold between 1990 and 1994. A massive effort to control that epidemic is almost solely responsible for a fall in the total number of cases in Europe since 1996, but the control is tenuous. Turkey's tourist boom means that malaria could start to pose a risk for western Europe. The WHO thinks that good medical care, vigilant surveillance and chilly winters will prevent malaria from re-establishing itself in northern Europe, despite the existence of mosquito species able to carry it. But the species that live in southern Europe are better at maintaining the parasite. There were outbreaks of malaria that were spread by local mosquitoes in Corsica in 1970, and in Bulgaria in 1995, while in 1997 an Italian caught the disease from a local mosquito. "The risk for the reappearance of the disease in some areas of southern Europe, where more efficient vectors are present, is real," warns the WHO. ** -- Tim C. |
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