U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy will visit the Orlando Mosquito Control District on Monday to review their efforts to combat Zika and alert the public to ways to prevent the virus from spreading.
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The child’s mother was infected with Zika while in an area that is dealing with ongoing Zika transmission, according to the health department.
“While not surprising, given the travel trends of our global city, this case is a strong reminder of the tragic consequences of the Zika virus”, said New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Mary T. Bassett in a statement released Friday. Zika infection can also be spread through sexual contact.
In Florida, there have been 334 cases of Zika since early February, all of them contracted after traveling overseas.
Officials said the health department is working closely with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention on the case.
According to the U.S. Zika response plan, Zika local transmission is defined as two or more cases not due to travel or sex with an infected person that occur in a one-mile diameter over the course of a month. Health authorities in Utah are investigating a unique case…
On Thursday, fogging trucks drove through a Miami-Dade County neighborhood where health officials are investigating a Zika diagnosis that doesn’t appear to have connection to travel outside the United States.
“Our best option is to try to find these mosquitoes quickly so that way we can eliminate them prior to their establishment”, said Ary Faraji, manager of the Salt Lake City Mosquito Abatement District. Zika is such a mild disease for most people that they don’t even know they have it, but it has been found to lead to severe birth defects if a pregnant woman is infected. The findings, they said, “confirm the species as a potential vector of the virus”.
“That’s money we didn’t budget for”, McNelly said.
She says not all the blood and urine tests from the people around the infected patient have come back yet, and they can’t definitively say that nobody involved traveled outside the United States recently.
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The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (http://bit.ly/2alPQIA ) reports that the funds are a part of the $60 million the center is giving to states, cities and territories to fight the virus through increased research efforts, laboratory improvement and improved mosquito control.
