Not in my experience. I have only flown international ten times or so in the past 20yrs but I have never seen that when returning to Aus.

Rather, "there is no evidence to show that using insecticide to kill mosquitoes inside aircraft cabins is effective in preventing introduction and spread of mosquito-borne diseases."

https://www.epa.gov/mosquitocontrol/aircraft-disinsection

Not sure where the idea came from that spraying the cabin aisle would penetrate the luggage bins, cargo hold, under the seats, or really anywhere.

As a kid (in the early 70s) I remember the air hostesses walking down the isles with a spray can. They don’t do that any more, but I wonder if or why they don’t add lower concentrations of the aerosol to the air conditioning at the end of the flight.

Malaria tropica (the disease) maps 1:1 to Plasmodium falciparum (the parasite that causes this disease)

I think Qdenga was approved in India very recently.

Is that the one where the degree of immunity is negative post infection

Got it as well a couple years ago, it was no joke. :/

Luckily we could get vaccinated a year later. If you’ve had it and catch another variant mortality rate jumps to 10%. But usually those variants don’t overlap, it’s region based.

Being a tropical disease makes it very unlikely and so a doctor will not even be considering it. By the time they’ve tried different therapies and start considering malaria, it’s too late. I’ve seen this happen to a couple of Africans who travel to Europe while gestation is ongoing and they’re dead 2 weeks later. As another thread said, it’s cheap to carry malaria meds when you travel, do it. If you start feeling offish - joint pain, fever, malaise, get a blood microscopic test for it and start the meds. Malaria is brutal

> It very glaringly points to some failure in the healthcare system.

Does it? "Have you been near the equator recently?" is a rather common question that GPs ask when you go see them with high fever. Doctors in Germany are absolutely aware of malaria, given how much we like to travel to all those beautiful, but unfortunately malaria-ridden countries.

The only thing, of course, is: That question wouldn't have helped here. However, this[0] source says airport staff are made aware of the possibility of contracting malaria and are told to watch out for symptoms.

[0]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/regional/hessen/malaria-am-...

I thought anything in the US is ridiculous amounts of money, when it’s related to health/hospital.

> Globally in 2024, there were an estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610,000 malaria deaths in 80 countries

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria

One question that gets asked is "have you traveled to another country?" When the answer is "no", then doctors no longer consider diseases that exist in other countries. So that is why they did not understand the parasitic infection until it was too late.

Some of the early symptoms resemble a bad cold.

The parasite that causes malaria (literally "bad air") can only survive in certain species of mosquitos. Those skeeters don't live in Germany. They used to live in the state I live in, but they were exterminated back in the 1950s & 1960s (thanks DDT!). And people from West Africa were naturally/genetically resistant, which was why slaves from that region were preferred over every other race in the southern US where malaria existed until the 1950s & 1960s. If you have 0 copies of the gene then you usually die (of malaria) before puberty. If you have 2 copies of the gene, then you die from sickle cell anemia (usually by your teen years). If you have 1 copy of that gene (another commenter used the term "heterozygote") then the parasite can't live in some of your red blood cells, so you survive to have children.

Germany never had it, and reported being malaria free in 1964. America, in 1970.

https://www.who.int/teams/global-malaria-programme/eliminati...

From the article:

"It [the Robert Koch Institute] said laboratory tests to determine the source of the infections were not expected to be available for several weeks. [...] The [Robert Koch] institute said malaria in Germany almost exclusively affects long-haul travellers who were infected in malaria-endemic areas, and that malaria transmitted within a German airport is rare. 'The lack of a travel history can lead to a delayed diagnosis. A delayed diagnosis increases the risk of a severe course of the diseases,' the institute said in its epidemiological bulletin."

Cerebral malaria is fatal with no treatment in many cases. For kids and elderly it’s fatal even with.

Likely this happened because they have no expertise and didn’t know what to do.

Imagine if you showed up in a hospital in the us with a sting from some super intense scorpion that only exists is some obscure part of the world. They’ll try to help, but likely can’t do much.

If the airport workers had travelled to another country, their doctors would have looked for tropical/travel diseases.

Usually, it is through shipping containers where unwanted insects cross borders. That's how murder hornets and flying cockroaches got into the US.

Maybe you're thinking about the The Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp/Belgium?

Doxycycline can also be used. I took doxycycline monohydrate daily for a month and had no observable impact on my digestion, which surprised me.

I was there for years, you can’t take malarias that long.

Botfly. Don't cut, they dig deeper.

The proper solution is a thick layer of petroleum jelly over your skin. The larva has to come up to breathe eventually (~hours). Use tweezers and grab it. Gross, but perfectly safe.

Malaria was endemic in Finland until the beginning of the 20th century, the people used to lived inside smoke-heated chimneyless log cabins together with animals, mosquitoes... and Plasmodium vivax...

USA wiped out malaria in the 50s using DDT which also made the California condor go extinct in the wild. During the 70s-90s DDT became illegal to use in most countries around the globe.

I’m not sure the USA would have been successful eradicating malaria without using DDT or something similar.

DDT caused the Bald Eagle population to drop from about 400,000 birds to just 47 nesting pairs.

No. Malaria epidemics occurred in medieval Europe, both in warmer countries (Italy, Greece) and in France, Germany and England. It was also common in portions of the US until large-scale eradication efforts.

It's unlikely to become a problem again because the climate is not optimal and these countries are wealthy, have advanced healthcare systems, and can spray everything with DDT again if they feel like doing it.

There were malaria epidemics in even quite temperate parts of Europe up to the mid 20th century, including Bavaria and even England, and it was endemic to parts of Italy and Greece. P. falciparum was found in bone samples of the Medicis.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8277918/

Sadly, maybe wait 5 to 10 decades then it could exist in many areas were it does not now.