A malaria outbreak tied to Frankfurt’s airport has claimed another life and sickened a second person, local health officials said, underscoring how imported mosquitoes can spark rare but dangerous infections far from the tropics.
Both people lived close to the airport, the Frankfurt health department reported, and officials believe they were infected by a mosquito that arrived on board an aircraft.
With these two cases, the total number of infections reported around Frankfurt since late August has risen to eight, including three deaths.
The cluster first drew attention in late August, when six Frankfurt Airport employees contracted malaria; two of those workers died.
Health authorities said the latest patients developed malaria “despite not having travelled to a malaria-endemic area and not having worked at the airport,” according to a statement.
Even so, both live in the “immediate vicinity” of Frankfurt Airport, in the Schwanheim district.
“No further cases of malaria have been reported to the public health department since the beginning of the week,” the statement said.
Because malaria is exceedingly rare in Germany, officials warned that doctors may not immediately suspect it—potentially slowing diagnosis and raising the risk of severe complications.
The agency urged physicians to “consider the possibility of malaria in patients presenting with unexplained fever, even in the absence of travel to a malaria-endemic area” — especially for people who live near the airport or work there.
Malaria is a parasitic disease spread by Anopheles mosquitoes and can trigger symptoms including headaches, nausea, high fever and chills.
The Frankfurt city health department stressed that the illness “is not transmitted from person to person”.
Globally, malaria kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Treatments are available, and patients who receive early care generally recover fully.
The last recorded case of “airport malaria” in Germany was in 2023, according to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the country’s public health agency.
