LISTEN: While Georgia is home to mosquitoes that carry the West Nile and encephalitis viruses, local health officials are warning of mosquito-borne diseases acquired abroad. GPB’s Ellen Eldridge has more.
While dengue, the most common mosquito-borne infection, is acquired abroad and doesn’t spread in Georgia, cases globally are the highest they've ever been, according to a health alert from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Symptoms aren't always present but can include high fever, head and body aches, nausea and a rash.
The disease is rarely fatal and only occasionally requires hospital care. Symptoms usually abate within a week or two.
Dr. Cherie Drenzek, an epidemiologist with the Georgia Department of Public Health, said the riskiest travel is to the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, which declared a public health emergency after recording 1,498 cases this year.
"So, because a lot of people travel to these areas, it's important to try to think about mosquito bite prevention while traveling as well as here at home in Georgia while you're outside," she said.
Dengue cases resurged globally after the COVID-19 pandemic, and 4,000 people in the Americas region died of dengue last year.
As of June 24, there have been more than 9.7 million dengue cases in the Americas, which is twice as many as the 4.6 million cases in 2023.
Georgia is also seeing a fair number of malaria cases that are also travel-related, Drenzek said.
"We don't have local acquisition of Zika or malaria or dengue here in Georgia," Drenzek said. "But those are the big ones that we see that people from Georgia can acquire while they're traveling."
Virus prevention comes down to bite prevention, she said.
We want to prevent bites by reducing the mosquito populations themselves, for example, in our backyards, she said.
"The best way to do that is to eliminate or drain any sources of water that might be near to your home, such as water that collects in cans or old tires or, kiddie pools or something like that," Drenzek said. "And that will reduce mosquito populations and avoid the bite."
