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The deadliest animal in the world is smaller than a pencil eraser and weighs around two-thousandths of a gram — less than the weight of a single raindrop. Every year, it kills an estimated 700,000 people by partaking in what scientists grimly call a “blood meal.”
These global shifts, which will only accelerate as the planet warms, have sparked concern that the diseases mosquitoes carry will exact an even higher toll in the months and years to come.
In June alone, five cases of locally transmitted malaria were discovered in Texas and Florida: the first cases acquired in the United States in two decades. These cases, experts say, are unlikely to have a connection to warming temperatures — conditions in Florida and Texas are already suitable for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. But as urban heat islands expand and temperatures rise, mosquito-borne diseases are expected to travel outside of their typical regions.
“Climate change allows the creeping edge of mosquito ranges to expand,” said Sadie Ryan, a professor of medical geography at the University of Florida.
Earlier this year, Georgetown University researchers published a paper in Biology Letters demonstrating that malaria mosquitoes’ ranges have already shifted in Africa over the past century, farther from the equator and into higher altitudes.
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Barrington Sanders, a Miami-Dade mosquito control inspector, sprays a pesticide to kill adult mosquitoes Thursday in Miami. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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