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So, before the vaccine announcement, there were apparently reports of local transmission of 14 cases of Dengue Fever in Florida.
⌠my husband has talked about his Indian coworkers being in the hospital a week for that. 
This is fine. 
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We had a local Dengue transmission in LA county last year as well, but thankfully we still have better public health protocols than Fl!!
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Oh man I didnât even hear about that 
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1 sounds much better than 14 though!!
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Off Topic, Mosquito risk
It starts with 1âŚ
To be fair itâs a mosquito borne illness and FL has more of those. But I donât think theyâre embracing the mitigation options because âoh itâs just mosquitosâ Despite mosquitoes being THE deadliest animal threat in the world for humans due to mosquito borne illness. (I forget how they compare in the leading causes of death period)
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Dengue vaccine history is super complicated and upshot is thereâs not an approved and available vaccine in the US anyway
Itâs all very interesting (I worked on it in my first post grad school job) but complex and I have terrible service
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I didnât even realize there was a vaccine! Or one in the works!
I find it more representative of climate change/disease spread and associated science denial generally.
Also, now that Iâm overanalyzing it, tropical diseases and eradicated diseases (dysentery, measles, polio, etc) get lumped by brain as âthings we shouldnât have to worry about in Rich Nations With Scienceâ, but that isnât really fair. We still have West Nile and Lyme and Rabies and I donât think other insect/animal borne illnesses are any more eradicatable (?) with Resources, they just live in different places, luckily for us. Until they donât because climate change and travel
TLDR we need more funding to eradicate ALL killer diseases not just the ones that affect white people. And to make those methods available to all communities once developed.
And Iâm not a biologist at all so I may be way off base and welcome your insights in better signal times.
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A significant part of my job is making sure there are as few as possible mosquito breeding places. I would be sadly unsurprised to find out Florida in general is not good at it.
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There is the Okeefenokee.
America has thousands of distinct mosquito control districts. Itâs a MESS. John Oliver did a piece on it once, actually quite fascinating but also depressing.
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I think youâre right! Generally though, itâs infinitely harder to eliminate a disease with an animal or environmental host because thereâs a reservoir of it that you canât really touch with vaccines or quarantines
too much information about dengue
Dengue has a really weird thing where there are 4 strains (serotypes) and you only get really sick the second time you get it. Also, like most diseases, itâs very unpleasant for adults but much more likely to kill children.
Sanofi had/has a dengue vaccine called Dengvaxia that was approved and widely used in the Philippines, but because of this weird virus quirk, it worked for most people (especially people who had already had dengue once), but for people who had never gotten it and then got serotype 2, it actually increases their risk of hospitalization. Which obviously led to a huge national freak out when they figured this out, and a ton of ongoing vaccine misinformation and hesitancy. This vaccine is still approved for older children/adults in the US but no one wants to take it so theyâre discontinuing it.
Takeda designed their vaccine to try to solve this problem and they got it approved in a lot of dengue endemic countries and the EU, but they pulled their application in the US for undisclosed reasons in 2023. I donât work there any more, so speculating wildly it might be because itâs not that effective in people who have never had dengue before, and most of the US doesnât have it?
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OMG, I feel the first one so deeply.
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Me and my new anti-platelet meds need Bruise Clues.
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Yes the calls are used for quality and training! In my former role we would use the calls to verify what people actually said from both employee (misdirection) or customer (what did they actually say vs interpretation).
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