Madrid Spain.- Dengue cases have increased in Spain in recent weeks, mostly by travelers from Cuba.
As specified The country, According to data offered by the autonomous communities, two thirds of the hundred diagnosed this summer in Spain correspond to people who arrived from the island.
Among them are the majority of the 36 patients treated in the Community of Madrid and nine in Andalusia; half of the 14 in the Valencian Community; six of the eight from Navarra; and the two hospitalized in Extremadura.
According to statements by Marta Díaz Menéndez, head of the Imported Pathology and International Health Unit of the Carlos III Hospital in Madrid, during the two years of the pandemic, with the closure of the borders, there were few imported cases, but “there is returning to the levels of previous summers”. “The particularity now is that the majority of sick tourists come from a single country, which is Cuba,” said the headline.
Of the 15 infected with dengue treated by the aforementioned hospital in the last two weeks, 13 came from Cuba.
For his part, Manuel Linares Rufo, president of the iO Foundation, specialized in tropical and travel medicine, referring to the particularities of the virus serotypes and the situation on the Island, recalled that “suffering a second infection with another serotype increases the risk of developing a serious condition and this complicates the situation in Cuba and other countries in the area, because serotypes 1, 2 and 3 are circulating in them simultaneously.”
After pointing out that Cuba is a country to which “the Spanish travel a lot”, Linares Rufo explained that in the Caribbean region there is a high circulation of this virus, but that in Cuba “the situation is especially complicated”, since “the epidemic peak that occurs naturally every four or five years with local factors has coincided with factors such as fuel restrictions that limit the number of fumigations and the reduction of prevention efforts during the pandemic”.
In early July, the Cuban Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP) reported that the island was going through a “complex” epidemiological scenario; as well as specified that the record of reproduction points of the dengue mosquito of the last 15 years had been broken. According to MINSAP data, in the third week of August almost 12,000 people with the disease were reported.
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