The alert for the dengue risk is already high given that several countries in Central and South America, such as Peru, Argentina, Guatemala and Brazil, have decreed a state of alert or emergency due to epidemics of this disease between February and March 2024 (in Italy there are already 48 cases of dengue this year).
But greater attention will need to be paid to the future due to climate change.
It is one of the indications contained in the health section of the European Climate Risk Assessment (Eucra), as told to ANSA by one of the authors, Cyril Caminade.
This is the first report drawn up by a European Union agency on the risks linked to climate change, published last Monday by the European Environment Agency (EEA).
Cyril Caminade, researcher in the Earth Sciences section of the International Center for Theoretical Physics "Abdus Salam" in Trieste (Ictp) dealt in particular with the growing risks posed by infectious diseases once limited exclusively to tropical areas which spread thanks to mosquitoes .
Studies by Caminade and his collaborators show that in southern Europe temperatures are already such that tiger mosquitoes can transmit diseases such as dengue and chikungunya.
"In Italy, Slovenia and Albania there is the most abundant population of tiger mosquitoes, endemic in these areas since the 1990s. They are now here and they will not go away - underlined Caminade - With global warming their seasonal activity becomes longer and the population itself is growing. These factors, combined with the fact that there are many people traveling to tropical areas, leads to an increase in the spread of dengue and chikungunya," he explained.
Although "the highest risk to human health posed by climate change" is actually "extreme heat in heat waves", "attention must be kept high on tropical infectious diseases", given the rapid and "worrying" increase in incidence of these pathologies: "In the last 10 years we have gone from 10 cases a year to hundreds, and there are also indigenous cases", explains Caminade.
In 2023, according to the Ministry of Health, there were 362 cases of dengue in Italy, of which 84 were indigenous.
"The most important thing to mitigate the risk of one of these diseases, dengue fever - which in 80% of cases is asymptomatic but can be fatal in case of reinfection with another variant - is to maintain public health surveillance and above all that the population has a high level of awareness of the risks and good practices. Furthermore, we must continue to monitor mosquito populations, such as disinfestations", concluded Caminade.
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