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Eight malaria cases around Frankfurt airport this summer—three of them fatal—were likely caused by parasites originating in West Africa, the city authorities said Wednesday.
"Genetic analyses suggest that the malaria pathogens originally come from West Africa and were probably introduced to Frankfurt by infected mosquitoes," Peter Tinnemann, head of the German city's public health department, said in a statement.
According to the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, which carried out the genomic analysis of the eight Frankfurt cases, the pathogens came from three different mosquitoes that caused separate clusters of cases in July, August and September.
Six of the people who fell ill had spent time at the airport, while the other two lived in the immediate vicinity.
None of them had spent time in an area where malaria is endemic.
Malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.
Germany's last recorded malaria episode dates back to 2023, according to the Robert Koch Institute, the country's public health agency.
The rarity of the disease in Germany can lead to delayed diagnosis and increases the risk of complications.
Frankfurt city authorities stressed that the type of malaria that occurred in these clusters is "completely curable" if detected and treated in time, and said that medical and hospital staff have been asked to be particularly alert to indicative symptoms.
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