At the end of October, 105 cases of local infection with the dengue virus were confirmed in Europe, 66 of them in Italy, 36 in France and three in Spain, RIA News reports.

Dengue fever is caused by an eponymous RNA-containing virus from the genus of flaviviruses. Four of its serotypes are known to infect people. The most dangerous are the first and third, which, when initially infected, cause a more severe form of fever up to hemorrhagic shock.

Mosquitoes spread the virus. After the bite, the incubation period lasts from three days to two weeks. In some, the disease is asymptomatic, so people do not go to the doctor. Others have fever, headaches, chills, nausea, rash.

Doctors who have not encountered dengue before confuse these symptoms with SARS and do not prescribe tests, so the real scale of the outbreak is difficult to assess. There is no special treatment. Repeated infection increases the risk of a more severe course, in which the patient is treated already in the hospital.

According to WHO statistics, over the past two decades, the number of cases of dengue in the world has increased by an order of magnitude - from half a million to five. The infection occurs in a hundred countries.

By 2050, half of the world's population will be forced to coexist with yellow-bordered and Asian tiger mosquitoes. These are the results of modeling by an international team of scientists published in Nature Microbiology.

By 2080, 197 countries will be at risk for infections carried by this blood-sucking species.