The WHO said its prediction that the Games would not fuel the spread of the Zika virus was being proved correct.
Advertisement
The CDC is tracking more than 1,500 cases of pregnant women who have been infected with Zika and at least 16 babies have been born with birth defects so far.
While DOH has already been delivering helpful resources like bug spray and Zika prevention kits to pregnant women in the area, today I directed them to begin working with Florida global airports to voluntarily provide bug repellant for travelers returning from countries that are experiencing outbreaks of the Zika virus. In the last few weeks, it has sickened more than 100 people in Singapore and started spreading in Florida.
But nearly daily downpours, average temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), large green areas and a population of more than five million people packed in a city that is half the size of Los Angeles, which has a population of 4 million, make Singapore a hospitable area for mosquitoes. Heymann said that studies are ongoing in the country and that the explanation could involve numerous factors.
Singapore, a regional financial centre and transit hub, is the only Asian country with active transmission of the virus.
In the 1.5-square-mile area of Miami Beach where locally-acquired cases of Zika were confirmed, Miami-Dade County’s Mosquito Control team conducted almost 2,000 proactive inspections, abatement and treatment of mosquito breeding and adult mosquito activity, and three truck sprayings throughout the area, and in an additional extended area.
The study was published online Thursday in the journal, Lancet.
Federal health officials have said for months that they expect to see cases of Zika infection in warm, humid Gulf Coast states such as Florida, Louisiana and Texas.
The virus was first identified in Uganda in 1947 and was unknown in the Americas until 2014. As we said, the U.S.is no exception.
A recent study from United Kingdom institutions the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Oxford, along with the University of Toronto in Canada, has found that more than two billion people could be at risk from Zika virus outbreaks in parts of Africa and Asia. It’s unclear how widely the original 1947 strain found in Africa may have spread.
Others said scientists should seize the chance now to prevent Zika from becoming entrenched elsewhere. To get a better understanding of how the virus spread through the aegypti population, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (DACS) set up traps and tested the insects in several points of the state – a process which the experts likened to looking for a needle in a haystack.
Florida is the only state in the continental USA where Zika is active, but its habitat is spreading.
Advertisement
This article was written by Maria Cheng from The Associated Press and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
