Heat Hits Texas, Honduras Gang Crackdown, Malaria in the US

So what's it like working outside?

Malaria has returned to the United States.

This country gets scattered cases, but normally they're only in people arriving from abroad.

So how did five people contract it locally?

They blame gangs for massacring 46 women inside a prison.

Our colleague Ada Peralta is following this story and helps us understand what's going wrong.

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This week that parking lot is about as hot as it's been.

The heat is straining the power grid and breaking temperature records.

I hope not being too hot while doing it. Good morning.

Here we are in June and we're breaking a ton of heat records, including the heat index, which is that feels like temperature.

Here in Austin last week we hit 118 degrees.

In San Antonio it was 116 heat index.

In Dallas it hit 117.

It's important to say that we're talking about the heat and the humidity here.

That's unusual in a lot of the state where heat waves are often associated with drought.

This humidity is keeping it very hot overnight.

People are obviously trying to stay inside if they can and a lot of cities have set up cooling centers.

I was out yesterday.

I ran into a guy named Andre Southall.

He's a welder here in Austin.

He was on a job site outside.

I asked him to describe what it's been like.

This is something that's getting a lot of attention right now because Texas Governor Greg Abbott

just signed a law ending mandatory water breaks for construction workers.

Here in Austin, for example, we had a local rule that said workers needed water breaks in the heat.

State Republicans ended those worker protections.

Southall's worried about that.

the heat index being 112, 15, that they can't stop and take water.

That's cruel and unusual, Paisley, I believe.

That's according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

There have been several reports around the state.

That includes nine heat-related deaths in Webb County around Laredo,

a mail carrier who died on the job last week in Dallas when the heat index was around 115 degrees.

Some of these deaths are still under investigation,

but obviously there may be many more that we're not aware of right now.

I talked to Victor Murphy, he's a climate program manager at the National Weather Service in Fort Worth,

and he says a warmer atmosphere just holds more humidity.

you know, these high dew points that we saw.

could be a weakening jet stream that's basically an air current that circles the globe.

A weaker jet stream means weather can get stuck in place,

like we're seeing with this heat over the south.

which devastated the power grid.

I guess heat can also put a lot of strain on the grid.

We set a new record for energy demand yesterday with ending up their ACs.

It looks like we'll do it again today probably.

The other question is how this early heat could introduce drought again to the state.

That could lead to more heat later in the summer.

July and August, so this really could just be the first chapter

in a really scorching Texas summer this year.

Its disappearance is one of the great public health stories.

Many kids learn in school how this country cut back on the mosquito-borne disease.

They used insecticides and window screens and good drainage of standing water.

But now it seems to be back.

So each year in the U.S., there's about 2,000 cases of malaria,

but all of those are generally travel-related.

It means it's usually found in people who have come back from sub-Saharan Africa,

Southeast Asia, other countries where malaria is common.

These five cases are locally transmitted.

So these patients got malaria where they live, four in southwest Florida and one in south Texas.

And this local transmission is something that the U.S. has not seen in 20 years.

So that prompted the CDC to send out an alert to doctors telling them to look out for more cases.

It's transmitted between people through mosquito bites.

And after someone gets bitten, it can take a week or a few weeks for symptoms to show.

Dr. Monica Parise with the CDC says then it can quickly become a medical emergency.

We don't want people to have traveled to a malarious area and then get a fever and just sit at home.

Or if you seek care and have been given a diagnosis and you're not getting better, you need to go back.

So maybe there was an influx of travelers who came back with malaria, got bitten by mosquitoes in the U.S.

Maybe that's coincided with a lot of rain, a lot of heat and humidity.

These are conditions that mosquitoes and the malaria parasites really thrive under.

And probably what happened is that these forces combined to cause a flare of cases.

You read about malaria in the United States.

I mean, it killed people then or it would just devastate their health for a long time.

How dangerous is this?

And so specific to the U.S., around 15 out of every 100 people who get malaria get seriously ill.

And every year we do see a few people who die from it.

And one thing to note is that malaria can be caused by one of five different parasite species.

And these cases in the U.S. are caused by one called Plasmodium vivax.

Steve, there's good news and there's bad news that comes with that.

So the good news is that this is not the most deadly one, although people still can be laid up for weeks with illness.

The bad news is that this is a species that can hide out in a person's liver and come back after a few weeks or a few months.

It's called recurrence, and so that makes it extra important for people to get the right diagnosis and take the right drugs

so that people can fully kick these parasites.

Should we expect that malaria is going to become a larger problem in the United States?

Malaria, as you mentioned, used to be a big problem in the U.S., and it's actually the reason the CDC was founded back in the 1940s.

They did a lot of work going door-to-door, and that led to the disease actually being eliminated from the U.S. by the early 1950s.

So they're watching these cases closely.

In the best-case scenario, these cases are a blip, but they are checking to make sure that they're not a sign of a bigger problem.

They've also thrown up roadblocks in the streets and made mass arrests.

Eder, good morning.

It started with a gang attack on a women's prison just outside the capital, Tegucigalpa.

And that left 46 women dead.

Some had been burned to death.

Others shot.

Others stabbed.

The president, Xiomara Castro, said that the attack had been planned by gangs.

But she said, quote, under the watchful eye and with the approval from prison authorities.

And then this past weekend, more carnage.

At least 20 people were dead, including 13 people when a gunman opened fire at a pool hall.

At the end of last year, they suspended some civil rights in some parts of the country.

But then we had all this violence.

And after the attack on the women's prison, President Xiomara Castro promised, quote, drastic measures.

And now we know what she meant by that.

Police, as you said, have set up roadblocks.

They've announced a curfew.

And they're working their way through the prisons.

They've confiscated knives and grenades and assault rifles.

And police have released videos showing inmates just in their boxers being lined up outside.

They're being made to cower.

And all you see is this mass of tattooed flesh.

And this is almost exactly the kind of images that we've seen coming out of El Salvador,

where they've gone after gangs viciously.

They've suspended their civil rights.

They've tortured gang members.

And they've kept them in overcrowded prisons.

And Gustavo Sanchez, who's the director general of the police in Honduras, gave a speech that seems to promise more of this.

Let's listen.

And, of course, that's the same thing that El Salvador calls its gang members.

even though many people did support those extreme measures.

Honduras is going for the same thing?

El Salvador has fully suspended certain civil rights, and they've done so for over a year.

But Honduras has only done it for parts of the country.

So they seem to be crawling toward El Salvador.

And I think that's why it's important to watch these developments,

because the security situation is in a pretty dire way in a lot of Latin American countries.

So, I mean, of course people see the human rights abuses that are happening in El Salvador,

but a lot of analysts I've spoken to say that people are so sick of crime that they're willing to sacrifice democracy or personal freedoms

if it means that they can sleep easy at night.

I'm Steve Inskeep.

Up First is produced by David West, Ana Perez, Mansi Khurana, and Lindsay Tauti.

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