Record number of Dutch tourists contracted dengue fever abroad

A record number of Dutch tourists contracted dengue fever while traveling abroad in the first half of this year. In the first six months, the Eurocross emergency center received 112 reports of Dutch tourists who got the disease. In all of last year, there were 43 reports, the Telegraaf reports. Eurocross expects around 200 dengue fever reports by the end of the year.

Common symptoms of dengue fever include a high fever, severe headache behind the eyes, coughing, and vomiting. Repeat infections make the disease more serious, and in extreme cases, it can be life-threatening. People contract the virus through the bite of a mosquito that carries it. It usually involves the yellow fever mosquito or the Asian tiger mosquito, which typically occurs in tropical and subtropical areas in Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia.

“I expected an increase, but not this big,” Floriana Luppino, a doctor at Eurocross, told the Telegraaf. In recent months, she has mainly helped people who became infected with dengue fever while holidaying in Southeast Asia. “But we are also seeing infections increasingly closer to home.” There have been reports from Southern European countries like Spain or France.

“Nowadays, people can indeed also contract dengue in the Mediterranean region,” Leo Visser, a professor of Infectious Diseases at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), told the newspaper. Climate change is making more and more areas habitable to the mosquitoes that carry the virus. “Because it is getting warmer in Europe, they can hibernate better here.”

There are various causes for the increase in infections, Visser said. Mosquito populations are currently thriving in the hot and wet weather El Nino is causing in Latin America, for example. And the more mosquitoes you have, the greater the chance that one is carrying the dengue fever virus. More people are also traveling further away after COVID-19.