"Damn the mosquitoes....full speed ahead" - Chikungunya and Caribbean tourism.

"Damn the mosquitoes....full speed ahead" - Chikungunya and Caribbean tourism. HT: Croft.

Looking for chikungunya news in the DR, I found this report on Dominican Today: To get 10M tourists Dominican Republic needs ‘50,000 more’ rooms. Excerpt and then a comment:

Santo Domingo.- To meet president Danilo Medina’s goal for Dominican Republic to receive 10 million tourists per year within a decade demands the construction of at least 50,000 additional hotel rooms, said Puntacana Group president Frank Rainieri on Friday. 

Lauding the tourism sector’s performance in recent months as tourist arrivals by air climbed 2.8 % last year according to the Central Bank, the mogul called for greater coherence among the entire sector’s players to achieve the President’s proposal. 

"We’ve have had growth, but regarding the President’s goal a series of adjustments should still be made and work with long-term planning, integration of all segments of the government along with the tourism industry, because 10 million tourists is a very important number, and that can be achieved, but there should be more consistency across all sectors," Rainieri said.

Neither the rest of the report nor the numerous comments have anything to say about the current status of chikungunya in the DR (not to mention dengue and cholera). The commenters' big issues are the frequent electrical blackouts and the threat of robbery.

Discouraging as blackouts and muggings may be to tourists, chikungunya is likely to scare off far more tourists. 

Travellers to the Caribbean are coming home to the US with the disease, and the media are picking up on those cases. Canadians have been a major source of tourism in Cuba, and when some returning tourist turns up in a Winnipeg or Toronto ER with chikungunya, the whole country will soon hear about it. 

A drop in Caribbean tourism would be bad enough. Affluent eastern Canadians and Americans in the northeastern US normally head for Florida like the swallows to Capistrano. Once chikungunya is endemic in Florida and the Gulf Coast, they may head for California—or Scandinavia, where you will run into mosquitoes but the mosquitoes have never run into chikungunya.

North America went through something similar when West Nile virus appeared and swept across the continent. Maybe chikungunya will be just another annoyance before yet another disease migrates into our climate-changed Utopia. Eventually we'll get the message.