“All four of these people live in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, and the Florida Department of Health believes that active transmissions of this virus could be occurring in one small area in Miami”.
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DOH is also expected to take on the load of Zika testing within the area where the state believes the transmissions occurred, a one-square-mile zone north of downtown Miami.
Puerto Rico health officials are reporting a total of 7,296 Zika cases in the US territory that include 788 pregnant women.
It’s the only part of the state now being tested for potential local transmissions of Zika, Scott said.
Three men and one woman in Miami-Dade and Broward counties have tested positive for the virus, prompting the local health department to test mosquitoes in the area.
Mosquitoes have apparently begun spreading the Zika virus on the USA mainland for the first time, health officials said Friday in a long-feared turn in the epidemic sweeping through Latin America and the Caribbean.
Still, U.S. health officials said they do not expect widespread outbreaks in this country of the sort seen in Brazil, in part because of better sanitation, better mosquito control and wider use of window screens and air conditioners.
Officials say those four are apparently the first of over 1,650 U.S. Zika cases to have gotten the disease from a mosquito in the U.S.
The virus is so mild that most people who are infected don’t even know they are sick, but infection during pregnancy can cause babies to born with disastrously small heads and other severe brain-related defects. And the state is contracting with pest control companies to ramp up pesticide spraying.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on July 28 requested all blood establishments in both counties stop collecting blood immediately, before state officials made the announcement the cases were locally acquired, and has asked blood centers in neighboring counties to exercise extreme caution when accepting donors. “What we have been doing is going out to the hotels and talking to the maintenance staff and educating them what to look for, because going out and mowing the grass and just keeping the place clean isn’t the same as looking for standing water”, said Terry Torrens, the county’s mosquito control director.
USA health officials said the US might see small clusters of infections.
These are the first cases in the United States which are thought to have been locally transmitted – meaning that the carriers did not contract the virus by traveling overseas, which is extremely unsettling news for expectant moms.
The main way people become infected with the virus is through the bite of an infected mosquito.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he’s confident in local mosquito control because they’ve successfully fought off outbreaks of West Nile, dengue fever and chikungunya.
On Thursday, the CDC reported 1,658 cases of the virus in the continental United States and Hawaii. “But if there’s good mosquito control, it doesn’t matter, you won’t get transmission”. The mosquito then bites someone else, spreading the virus.
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Scott has allocated $26.2 million in emergency funding toward Zika virus prevention and control. He has called on Floridians to wear bug repellent and dump out standing water around their homes in an effort to reduce the risk of infection.
