The Herald said more than half of the hotel rooms in Miami-Dade County are located in Miami Beach, and city officials feared that active Zika transmission in Miami Beach could lead to a huge loss of tourist dollars. In fact, one baby has even been born here with microcephaly, which is a severe birth defect caused by Zika where the baby is born with an abnormally small heads.
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Since then, 35 people who are believed to have been infected locally through the bites of mosquitoes have been identified.
A handful of Zika cases have been identified and health officials are deciding which area or areas to include in any updated travel guidance, the source said. The number of Zika cases there now total 10,690, with 1,035 of those being pregnant women.
The confirmation, made this morning, came just over a week after the Ministry of Health revealed that three people suspected of having Zika after returning from overseas were being tested for the virus.
The Herald says the Florida Department of Health has not responded to their request for comment. To date the infections have been mostly contained within a small area in the Wynwood neighbourhood of Miami. The city saw a record 15.5 million visitors in 2015, according to the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. Dr. Amesh Adalja, an expert in infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said it would not be surprising to see new clusters of Zika cases pop up in different areas or counties of Florida. That is, people traveled to countries where the virus is already established and brought it back with them. “The Zika virus does not breed in water, but in specific mosquitoes that can transmit it”.
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USA officials said they don’t expect to see a Zika epidemic in the United States similar to those in Latin America. Partners of pregnant women are advised to use a condom to guard against sexual transmission during pregnancy. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) put out an informational poster that reads, in part: “If you get infected with Zika and a mosquito bites you, you can pass the virus to the mosquito”.
