WE'RE BUGGING OUT

As the planet heats up, mosquitoes are carrying dangerous pathogens farther and farther north. Not gonna lie - it's scary. But there's lots you can do to lower your risk.

- MERYL DAVIDS LANDAU

All day long you’ve been anticipating a peaceful walk in the park, but now that you’re outside—sun setting gloriously over the trees, a cacophony of bird chirps all around—you remember why you haven’t done this in a while: You are now dinner for a swarm of skeeters. Swatting and scratching, you racewalk back to your car.

Mosquitoes are an age-old nuisance; they go back more than 100 million years, having made their high-pitched buzzing sounds in the ears of dinosaurs. But now their bites may become more than an itchy ordeal, as climate change alters their habitats and behaviors in ways that make the transmission of disease-causing pathogens more likely.

Malaria, dengue, chikungunya—we think of these mosquito-borne illnesses as happening elsewhere. Malaria used to be a problem in the U.S., sickening many in the American South until it was controlled in the early 1950s. But now cases of malaria and those other illnesses are slowly increasing across the U.S. “Climate change is expanding the ranges where pathogen-carrying mosquitoes can exist in the country, and it’s lengthening mosquito season so there’s more opportunity to be bitten,” says Beth McGraw, Ph.D., who studies the issue as a professor of biology at Penn State University.

Ticks may get most of the headlines, but it’s mosquito species such as Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus that spread dengue (pronounced den-gay), chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever. These insects are now thriving better than they had been in Southern states, and they’re moving northward as well. “We’re seeing these mosquitoes in new places, including the Northeast and the Midwest,” McGraw says. The mosquitoes that transmit West Nile virus are also expanding their range.