Mobile County is the latest to join the list.
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The cases were confirmed in Calhoun, Cullman, Etowah, Houston, Jefferson, Lawrence, Lee, Limestone, Madison, Mobile, Montgomery, Morgan, Shelby.
Health authorities have issued an unprecedented health warning for pregnant women to stay away from the one-square-mile area in Wynwood and Edgewater. For example, they have notified the public to call 311 to report standing water where mosquitos breed. Public health officials, however, are on high alert for transmission cases within the state.
“We cannot expect that we can run in and flip a switch and say ‘Oh, OK the outbreak is over, ‘” Schaffner said, acknowledging the challenges of the Florida health department. The news conference will take place in the Media Room on the Third Floor of the Keeler Building at 251 N. Bayou Street. Sexual transmission of the virus means that for men who travel to endemic areas and who have a pregnant partner, abstinence or condom use for at least the duration of pregnancy is recommended.
“It’s paradoxical. The reasons we’re finding other cases is that the system is working very well”, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told ABC News. There is no vaccine or medicine to treat Zika.
“By the time a person contracts that illness and show symptoms, the mosquito that introduced that virus to that person may have already lived that live cycle and expired”, said Richard Smith, Duval County superintendent of Mosquito Control Division. “We got more complaints after that happened than we’ve had all year”.
The most common symptoms of Zika are fever, rash, joint pain and conjunctivitis.
Last week, mosquitoes south of Louisville tested positive for the West Nile virus.
Along with standard mosquito traps, the base is using special traps created to capture mosquitoes that bite during the daytime, he said.
Cover exposed skin by wearing long-sleeved shirts, long trousers, and hats.
One of the cases is not in the small area that officials think is the only real local Zika hotspot, but there’s no evidence the virus is spreading in Florida like it has across Latin America. One case was detected in Palm Beach while three cases were found in Miami-Dade.
During the first week of infection, Zika virus can be found in a person’s blood and can pass from an infected person to a mosquito through mosquito bites.
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Haiti’s healthcare system is still suffering from the fallout of the 2010 quake that killed about 300,000 people and a still-ongoing cholera epidemic that began shortly afterward, killing about 8,600 people and infecting 707,000. The virus can cause birth defects in children whose mothers were infected during pregnancy, according to the CDC.
