The state’s first Zika case was confirmed February 10 in Morgan County.
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Cuban media are reporting that 21-year-old woman in Havana who has never been overseas, has been diagnosed with the Zika virus.
Nevertheless, health experts are still trying to determine whether pregnant women infected with Zika are at greater risk of having children with birth defects such as microcephaly, a condition marked by an unusually small head and brain damage.
The World Health Organisation says Zika is rapidly spreading in the Americas because it is new to the region, people aren’t immune to it, and the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries it is just about everywhere – including along the southern United States. Check with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the latest information on prevention and lists of areas with Zika cases: www.cdc.gov/zika/index.html.
People infected with Zika can expect fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes for a couple of days or up to a week, and hospitalization is rare, according to the CDC.
Miami-Dade County has 28 confirmed ZIka cases. Seven of the eight cases occurred in a four-month period around the end of the outbreak, aiding researchers in their conclusion that the infections occurred among women who were in the first trimester of their pregnancies. There is no indication that Zika virus can spread from person to person through casual contact, but it can be spread from a man to a woman through sexual transmission.
The fight against the mosquitoes continues, but for now, the public’s alarm at Zika’s rapid spread may be at least partially warranted.
Under the DOH’s surveillance system, samples collected from cases with suspected Zika virus will be collected and sent to the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine (RITM), which received a fresh supply of testing kits late last week. “Our findings support WHO’s recommendations for pregnant women to protect themselves from mosquito bites”. Therefore, transmission of the virus from human-to-mosquito and then from mosquito-to-human is extremely unlikely.
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The Cuban government, which has fumigated neighbourhoods and homes for decades to contain dengue, another mosquito-borne illness, put doctors on alert for the virus weeks ago and ramped up mosquito eradication efforts in neighbourhoods in expectation of Zika’s inevitable arrival. Those cities see a much higher number of travelers arriving from countries on the Zika travel advisory list published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
