Singapore faces a dengue “emergency.” It has already exceeded 11,000 cases — far beyond the 5,258 reported throughout 2021 — before June 1, when its peak dengue season traditionally begins.
Experts are warning that it’s a grim figure for Singapore — whose tropical climate is a natural breeding ground for the Aedes mosquitoes that carry the virus — and for the rest of the world. That’s because changes in the global climate mean such outbreaks are likely to become more common and widespread in the coming years, CNN reported.
‘The outbreak in Singapore has been made worse by recent extreme weather, experts say, and its problem could be a harbinger of what is to come elsewhere as more countries experience prolonged hot weather spells and thundery showers that help to spread both the mosquitoes and the virus they carry.’
“[Cases] are definitely rising faster,” said Singapore’s minister for home affairs Desmond Tan on the sidelines of a neighborhood inspection for dengue mosquitoes. “It’s an urgent emergency phase now that we have to deal with.”
Dengue and Climate Change
“The disease is now endemic in more than 100 countries,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a global dengue report in January 2022, noting that cases had increased “30 fold in the last 50 years.”
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Singapore’s dengue surge results from multiple factors like the recent warm, wet weather and a new dominant virus strain, said Ruklanthi de Alwis, a senior research fellow at the Duke-NUS Medical School an expert in emerging infectious diseases, CNN reported.
But climate change, she said, was likely to make things worse. “Past predictive modeling studies have shown that global warming due to climate change will eventually expand the geographical areas (in which mosquitoes thrive) and the length of dengue transmission seasons,” de Alwis said.
Source: IANS
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