From the article, in the section titled "History":
"Tropical diseases have been affecting people in the American South as long as humans have been living there. In 2003, archaeologists discovered that mummified remains in the Rio Grande Valley from more than 1,000 years ago showed signs of Chagas disease. Transatlantic trade brought the mosquito Aedes aegypti over from Africa, and it thrived in the long, humid summers south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Human travelers brought pathogens that could be transmitted by imported and native mosquitoes. As a result, European settlers in North America were cut down by repeated epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, and dengue."
That's why the article title carefully says "resurgence," not implying that this is anything we haven't seen before. This will be a challenge for medical personnel and public health personnel in the United States, especially for people trained farther north in the Temperate Zone like where I live, but information can travel even faster than disease vectors, and I expect the long-term trend of age-adjust all-cause mortality, including infectious disease mortality, dropping over time[1] to continue.
"Tropical diseases have been affecting people in the American South as long as humans have been living there. In 2003, archaeologists discovered that mummified remains in the Rio Grande Valley from more than 1,000 years ago showed signs of Chagas disease. Transatlantic trade brought the mosquito Aedes aegypti over from Africa, and it thrived in the long, humid summers south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Human travelers brought pathogens that could be transmitted by imported and native mosquitoes. As a result, European settlers in North America were cut down by repeated epidemics of malaria, yellow fever, and dengue."
That's why the article title carefully says "resurgence," not implying that this is anything we haven't seen before. This will be a challenge for medical personnel and public health personnel in the United States, especially for people trained farther north in the Temperate Zone like where I live, but information can travel even faster than disease vectors, and I expect the long-term trend of age-adjust all-cause mortality, including infectious disease mortality, dropping over time[1] to continue.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2014/018.pdf