An urgent headline in Scientific American last month boldly declared:
“A Nasty Tropical Skin Disease Is Now Endemic in the U.S”
My first thought reading that was…
DUH! Haven’t we known that for years???
Apparently not, because I’ve seen versions of the story breathlessly repeated not only in SA, but also NPR, CNN, and many other news outlets. It also seems to have caught physicians treating the disease by surprise:
The boy had tested positive for cutaneous leishmaniasis, a neglected tropical disease. The World Health Organization says between 600,000 and 1 million new infections happen worldwide every year, mostly in tropical regions of the Americas, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and Central Asia — not in Texas….
“I was shocked, because in medical school, we're taught that this is a tropical disease, something that you see in immigrants, military returning from deployment, people who went on vacation to South America or Asia or Africa," McIlwee says.” (NPR story)
That quote ill…
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