Mosquito Trapped on Plane Kills Three People

A third person has died in an extremely rare malaria outbreak centered around Germany’s busiest airport, where health officials believe infected mosquitoes were inadvertently carried into the country aboard international aircraft.

The latest victim lived in Schwanheim, a Frankfurt neighborhood immediately next to Frankfurt Airport, but had neither traveled to a malaria-endemic country nor worked at the airport, according to the Frankfurt Health Department.

The person was one of two Schwanheim residents recently diagnosed with Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite responsible for the most dangerous form of malaria.

Frankfurt officials confirmed the death on Sept. 17.

The stunning case brings the apparent Frankfurt-area outbreak to eight infections this summer — six airport employees and two nearby residents.

Three of those patients have now died.

The first cluster emerged among workers at Frankfurt Airport in July. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, six employees were eventually diagnosed with P. falciparum malaria despite none reporting travel to a region where malaria regularly circulates.

Two of the airport workers died, while the other four recovered and were discharged from the hospital.

Now the two infections outside the airport itself have given investigators another troubling piece of the puzzle.

Neither Schwanheim resident worked at Frankfurt Airport or had recently traveled to a malaria-endemic country, leaving health officials to believe their infections also resulted from mosquitoes brought into Germany through air travel.

But officials have not said that investigators found one particular infected mosquito aboard a specific flight.

Instead, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control says one or more infectious Anopheles mosquitoes were likely transported into Germany aboard an aircraft and survived long enough to bite people after arriving.

That unusual chain of events is known as “airport malaria.”

Unlike ordinary imported malaria — in which a traveler contracts the infection abroad and becomes ill after returning home — airport malaria can strike someone who has never visited a country where t