The upward trend in dengue fever in the U.S. is still not being blamed — at least by scientists — on climate change.

A new study published in the journal Emerging and Infectious Diseases (May 2011) reported:

We found a dramatic increase in the number of hospitalizations for patients with dengue fever in the United States. This increase is not surprising considering that 1) the number of cases in disease-endemic regions has increased in recent years, and 2) a substantial number of travelers annually enter the United States from the tropics and subtropics.

Now while the researchers acknowledge that they didn’t have access to patient travel histories and so can’t attribute the disease incidence to travelers, it apparently did not even occur to them that that climate change, much less manmade climate change, was in any way connected to the dengue uptick.

This is in stark contrast to the quacks at the American Medical Association who recently could think of no reason other than manmade climate change for the increase in dengue.