Cases of Dengue fever have been recorded in Lazio since August. This spread is expected to persist for a few more weeks, at least for the entire month of October and potentially until the beginning of November. The indication comes from the Lazio regional congress of the Italian Society of Infectious and Tropical Diseases (Simit) ‘Studying the past to understand the future’, organized by DotCom, with scientific director Gianpiero D’Offizi, president of Simit Lazio, and director of the Unit of Infectious Diseases and Hepatology of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani.
“In Lazio there is an increase in dengue cases, both imported from endemic countries and indigenous, i.e. contracts in Italy. A patient can return to Italy with this infection and if he is bitten by the tiger mosquito, it becomes infected and after an incubation period of 10-15 days can infect another person”, explains Emanuele Nicastri, director of the High Intensity Infectious Diseases Unit of care, Inmi Spallanzani. “For the month of October, circulation of the vector is still expected, at least until the first week of November. If we find ourselves faced with a patient with symptoms attributable to this infection, it will be a good idea to take a rapid test which can be carried out in specialized infectious disease centres, for example by coming directly without a reservation to the Spallanzani institute, which gives an answer in a few hours, in way both to take care of the patient and to be able to start a disinfestation that avoids the spread of an outbreak and therefore new cases”.
In the Region, however, there are no other tropical infections already present in the past or widespread in other areas of Italy. For West Nile, for example, “in Lazio there is no evidence of human cases, nor in equids, nor in birds, nor in mosquitoes collected by the zooprophylactic institute. We are protected by the Apennine arc, while it is present in Sardinia and in the Po Valley”, adds Nicastri. Not even chikungunya is present “in our territory nor is there any evidence of an increase in cases, either imported or native, as happened in 2007 and 2017”.
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