Singapore, June 8, 2022 – The explosion of cases of Dengue a Singapore it’s a bad sign for the rest of the world: the areas traditionally most infested by Aedes mosquitoes, which carry and transmit the tropical infectious disease virus, are expanding as a result of climate change.
For the same reason in Singapore the epidemic season started earlyand already at the end of May they registered twice as many cases compared to 2021. The World Health Organization released a report in January that dengue was “endemic in more than 100 countries”, with an increase in cases of “30 times in the last 50 years”. WHO says more: “Not only is the number of infections growing as the disease spreads to new areas, but explosive outbreaks are occurring.”
CNN heard from Ruklanthi de Alwis, an emerging infectious disease specialist at Duke-Nus Medical School in Singapore, who confirmed the risk that the virus responsible for ‘bone-breaking’ expand your presence: “Global warming due to climate change will eventually widen the geographic areas affected by Dengue and lengthen its broadcast season.”
So as pointed out by the WHO we owe it to us wait for more frequent and widespread outbreaks in larger areas of the planet. The record year for Dengue was 2019, with 5.2 million cases worldwide, and thousands of deaths across Asia. Instead for Singapore, where Dengue has been endemic for decades, the worst year was 2022 with 35,315 cases and 28 deaths.
While this year “about 11,670 cases of Dengue had been reported as of May 28,” more than doubled from 5,258 in 2021, “about 10% of which required hospitalization,” a Singapore health official told Cnn. And the most risky season has just begun.
Singapore Minister of Internal Affairs Desmond Tan has set the moment an “urgent phase of emergency”. According to experts, the advance is due to “multiple factors” including “the increasingly hot-humid climate and a new dominant viral strain”. The Singapore Weather Service has sounded the alarm: the country is warming up 2x faster than the rest of the world, and daily maximum temperatures could reach 37 ° C by 2100. “Extreme weather conditions create perfect conditions for the reproduction of mosquitoes “that transmit Dengue, but also Zika and Chikungunya, according to Winston Chow, of the College of Integrative Studies at Singapore Management University.