Nationally, health officials reported, as of Monday, that 30 people in Miami tested positive for the virus in a small, local cluster and one person in Texas may have acquired the virus while visiting Florida.
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Despite there not being a big risk of contracting Zika in Grant County, the GCHD encourages residents to avoid mosquito bites if at all possible.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a level 2 travel notice on Thursday for people traveling to destinations that have been affected by Zika virus.
“With these species, spraying doesn’t work much because normally you do spraying in the evening”, Dr. Mangla said.
FRANKFORT – Kentucky Department of Public Health officials have reported that, as of August 5, there have been 18 confirmed cases of the Zika virus in the state, and all were related to travel with no evidence of local transmission within Kentucky.
Zika, which first emerged a year ago in South America, is particularly risky to pregnant women because it can cause severe birth defects. In Florida, there are 59 cases of Zika involving pregnant women.
All 25 cases of the virus are travel-related, the department said in a press release.
Mosquitoes in Florida have picked up the virus from biting people with the disease – it’s the only state in which local transmission has been spotted so far.
Because of patient privacy rights under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), no identifying information of the Mobile County patient will be made available to the public. The second new non-travel related infection was located outside that area in Miami-Dade County.
There have been 8,602 cases of Zika confirmed in the US thus far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Florida Department of Health.
The majority of people who contract Zika experience short-term, mild flu-like symptoms. “This virus can spread from mother to fetus during pregnancy and cause severe birth defects”.
Eisenberg said that paying attention to past outbreaks of locally transmitted dengue, rather than the mere presence of these mosquitoes, can give researchers a better guess as to the areas most vulnerable to local transmission of Zika. Their first priority is to find those infected.
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Along with standard mosquito traps, the base is using special traps created to capture mosquitoes that bite during the daytime, he said.
