A Maryland resident recently came down with malaria without ever traveling abroad. The Maryland Department of Health announced on August 18 that there was a “case of locally acquired malaria in a Maryland resident who lives in the National Capital Region. The individual was hospitalized and is now recovering. They did not travel outside the United States or to other U.S. states with recently locally acquired malaria cases.”
Last month, officials in Florida reported seven cases of locally acquired malaria. Two months ago, the Texas Department of State Health and Services reported a case of locally acquired malaria.
Those cases were the first ones reported in the U.S. in over 20 years.
Maryland’s Health Secretary, Laura Scott, said, “Malaria was once common in the United States, including in Maryland, but we have not seen a case in Maryland that was not related to travel in over 40 years.”
Although locally acquired malaria is quite rare in America, there are over 2,000 cases of malaria reported in our country each year, almost all afflicting people returning from abroad.
Malaria is transmitted by mosquitoes (specifically, the female Anopheles mosquito). Scientists in Israel have developed a new, more effective mosquito repellent, but the Food and Drug Administration’s slow and cumbersome approval processes will keep that mosquito repellent out of the U.S. for years.
The FDA also keeps the most effective sunscreens off the U.S. market. It may do the same with the new mosquito repellent, just as the Obama administration impeded anti-mosquito remedies during an outbreak of the disease Zika, which results in birth defects. As Washington University in St. Louis notes, “Due to Zika virus, more than 1,600 babies were born in Brazil with microcephaly, or abnormally small heads, from September 2015 through April 2016.” The Obama administration banned a life-saving pesticide, preventing it from being used to kill mosquitos carrying this awful disease, even though, as the New York Post noted at the time, Zika “infected nearly 300 pregnant women in the United States, putting their babies at risk for a devastating birth defect. . . . hundreds of babies are at risk of a horrifying brain defect called microcephaly. Infants who don’t perish outright need extensive care, which can cost up to $10 million.”
The FDA blocks new innovations that will protect your skin. Insider reports that the “US has awful sunscreen compared to Asia and Europe. Strict, decades-old FDA rules are to blame”:
- European and Asian sunscreens boast stronger and smoother formulas than sunscreens found in the US.
- That’s because the FDA is slower to approve new UV filters compared to other countries.
