“If you’re concerned about Zika”, CDC Director Tom Frieden said, “you may consider postponing all nonessential travel to all parts of Miami-Dade County”.
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As of August 17, 2016, 2,260 cases of Zika had been reported in the continental United States and Hawaii, including 529 in pregnant women.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed locally transmitted cases of the Zika virus in Florida, specifically the Miami Beach area and are advising pregnant women to not visit the region.
“We expect that the border is going to be the first place that we’re going to see the disease”, said Dr. John Thomas, an assistant professor at UT-RGV.
No locally transmitted cases of the virus have been found in Montgomery and no mosquitoes have been found carrying it, county officials reported Thursday.
With every new case of the Zika virus comes a growing urgency to develop a vaccine.
And though Ehrlich said and he and his wife Caroline did not have any immediate plans to have more children, any thought of doing so has been indefinitely shelved. “They felt, I guess, that they could impact tourism”, Kahane said. “That’s scary for us because we eventually want to have more kids”. Eye Witness News quotes Henry Harteveld of Atmosphere Research Group as saying the latest Zika outbreak in the area could seriously jeopardize the travel industry. “The vast majority of local transmissions hit a dead end after one or two people in one household”.
Frieden said it is hard to determine if cases are locally acquired and whether cases are related.
So far this year, mosquito trapping has yielded no positive results for any vector-borne diseases.
Two patients are Miami-Dade County residents, and three are tourists, including one man and two women, Scott said.
“All three of these people travelled to Miami”, Scott said.
Gov. Rick Scott has directed Florida’s health department to offer mosquito spraying and related services at no cost to Miami-Dade County’s hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions. First, the large number of highrise buildings make it impossible to aerial spray the area for mosquito removal.
“These are individual instances, and do not represent spread throughout the area”, Frieden said.
So Neitzel says as long as imported mosquitoes appear primarily in commercial sites, where they are trapped and destroyed, they shouldn’t come into contact with many people.
On Thursday, Scott’s office adamantly disputed reports that mosquitoes were transmitting Zika in Miami Beach, despite multiple health officials telling reporters that indeed was the case.
A team of experts across several disciplines at CDPH is working closely with local public health departments, vector control agencies and the medical community to ensure that California is responding aggressively and appropriately to the emerging threat of Zika virus.
Now there is no vaccine to prevent Zika or medicine to treat it. Congress has not approved new funding to fight the virus, so federal agencies are diverting funds from other programs to continue work on vaccine candidates.
The virus has been linked to more than 1,700 cases of microcephaly in Brazil, a potentially severe birth defect that can cause infants to be born with shrunken heads and lead to developmental problems.
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Just how much of a risk there is “is not quantifiable based on our current information”, said Linton.
