Malaria is a potentially life threatening disease spread by mosquitos.

About 2,000 cases per year – or five per day, on average – are discovered in the U.S. but are thought to have originated in travelers from other countries.

Currently, seven cases thought to have come from “local” spread (not travelers) have been found in the U.S.

Most media stories have implied this is due to climate change and will only get worse (see screen snapshot of headlines, below).

Reality check:

• The first known case of malaria in the land that would eventually become the U.S. was in 1492.
• Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant all contracted malaria.
• The CDC was founded in 1946 with its first objective being to control malaria in the U.S.
• The CDC’s predecessor agency was founded in 1942 to control malaria around military bases, including in the southern U.S. states. This is the reason the CDC’s HQ is in Atlanta (in a southern state).

And:

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the US typically saw around 2,000 imported malaria cases each year, with around 300 severe cases and five to 10 deaths. The cases are mostly among people who return from travel to malaria-endemic regions. The occasional small clusters of locally acquired cases, like the recent cases in Florida and Texas, are typically thought to be spread from an imported case, usually in a tight geographic area.

Malaria spreading in Texas and Florida; first US-based cases in two decades | Ars Technica (The reporter has a PhD in microbiology.)

And:

Currently, there are more than 240 million malaria cases each year worldwide, and there were over 600,000 deaths in 2021. Ninety-five percent of the case and 96 percent of the deaths are in the African region, according to the World Health Organization. Eighty percent of the malaria deaths in Africa are in children under age 5.

Malaria used to be endemic in temperate areas of the US but was considered eliminated from the country in 1951 after the establishment of the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas—a precursor to the CDC. The elimination was achieved by improved sanitation, medical care, drainage of mosquito breeding sites (mosquitoes breed in standing water), and insecticide use.

There is no indication the current out break has to do with climate change. But the media spins hysteria even when the evidence shows us that malaria has been in the U.S. for centuries, at several orders of magnitude greater than today:

Update – as of July 20 there has been one new case of local spread, also in Florida: Number of confirmed malaria cases in U.S. rises to 8 – UPI.com

This story seems to have faded away once nothing more happened, perhaps in hopes we’d forget the media hype.

It should also be noted that in the several weeks since these first cases were publicized, temperatures in the U.S. got much higher – which the media said would lead to more cases. But the number of locally spread malaria cases increased by one, negating the claims of media headlines.