Florida is in the middle of one of its worst dengue fever surges in decades, and Tampa Bay health officials are asking residents to do something simple: get rid of standing water around their homes.
The Florida Department of Health has confirmed a death tied to the outbreak, though it has released few details. The Tampa Bay Times first reported that the victim was an elderly Tampa woman.
The state has recorded 152 locally acquired dengue cases this year, according to the Florida Department of Health figures cited by the Associated Press. That already ranks as the second-highest annual total on record, behind the nearly 200 cases reported in 2023. A more recent report puts the statewide count at 190, compared with 62 cases last year. Because many infected people never get sick, the real number of infections could be higher than the reported case count.
The outbreak is centered just north of Tampa, where crews have been spraying for mosquitoes day and night. Several Tampa Bay counties have declared local states of emergency, and residents of Pinellas, Pasco and Hillsborough counties have been urged to empty standing water from garbage cans, gutters and buckets, keep pools chlorinated and report mosquito problems.
A Hillsborough County spokesperson, Chris Wilkerson, said the situation is “wildly unusual for us.”
A rare outbreak
For decades, most dengue cases in the U.S. were in travelers who picked up the virus abroad, along with locally acquired cases in Puerto Rico. Key West reported the first locally acquired cases in the continental U.S. in 2009 and 2010. Health officials and experts point to recent weather conditions, including warm temperatures and heavy rain, that allowed the virus-carrying mosquitoes to multiply.
Michael von Fricken, a University of Florida associate professor of environmental and global health, said the outbreak could spread from its current center. With the mosquitoes so common in Florida, he said, the threat is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
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