The Misguided Buzz About Mosquitoes
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 September 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
An outbreak of eastern equine encephalitis in the northeast made headlines, but as far as mosquito-borne illnesses go, EEE is serious but still rare. What’s getting way too common is the mosquito itself.
Guest: Amesh Adalja, doctor and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Cheyna Roth.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When cases of eastern equine encephalitis showed up on the East Coast this summer, |
| 0:08.8 | Eamesh Adulge's phone started ringing. |
| 0:10.9 | I was a little bit surprised because eastern equine encephalitis is an infection that we usually |
| 0:17.8 | have a handful of cases every year. |
| 0:20.9 | Amish is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. |
| 0:24.9 | He's also an infectious disease, critical care, and emergency medicine doctor. |
| 0:29.8 | He says he got a whole bunch of calls, mostly from reporters. |
| 0:34.0 | Almost like a feeding frenzy of the media the way you get when, you know, it's |
| 0:38.4 | Ebola or some new COVID thing happening, So that was a little surprising to me. |
| 0:46.0 | You may have heard the recent news |
| 0:48.0 | about what's sometimes called |
| 0:50.0 | Triple E, a virus spread by mosquitoes. |
| 0:52.0 | A man in New Hampshire died from it in August. Another got seriously |
| 0:56.8 | ill. A handful of other cases were reported in New Jersey, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts, where some towns told residents to limit evening |
| 1:05.4 | activities. |
| 1:06.4 | Oxford has been declared a critical risk for Tripoli, prompting health department officials |
| 1:12.1 | to recommend a 6 p.m. curfew for outdoor activities |
| 1:15.5 | including club sports. The disease is rare but serious and as a lay person it can be hard to know |
| 1:22.2 | how to parse the risk. |
| 1:24.0 | We have about 12 or 15 cases that are reported every year. |
| 1:29.0 | And what's notable about this virus is that if you get bitten by a mosquito and you develop symptoms, |
| 1:36.5 | the mortality rate can be 30% or higher. And if you survive, it's a lot of this ability that ensues after an infection. |
... |
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