Florida health officials say there have been at least 25 local Zika infections.
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Zika has been tied to a severe birth defect known as microcephaly, in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and under-developed brains.
Puerto Rico reported the first microcephaly case acquired on United States soil in May, involving a dead foetus that a woman turned over to health authorities.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Friday declared the emergency as Puerto Rico said that there were 10,690 laboratory confirmed Zika cases on the Caribbean island of 3.5 million, including 1,035 pregnant women.
In Williams County, a 32-year-old woman who recently returned from Jamaica was informed this week that her test was positive for the virus, said Rachel Aeschliman, director of nursing for the health department. The declaration is a tool that provides support to the government of Puerto Rico to address the outbreak on the island and underscores the public health risk of Zika, particularly to pregnant women and women of childbearing age. This new funding comes after an earlier $589 million allocated to Zika research last April.
Canada’s public health agency has confirmed the country’s first case of Zika-related defects in a fetus.
In February, state health officials confirmed the first case of the Zika virus in MI.
“The failure to pass a Zika emergency supplemental (appropriation) has forced the administration to choose between delaying critical vaccine development work and raiding other worthy government programs to avoid these delays”, Burwell said in a letter to Congress.
For people who travel to places with active transmission of the virus, authorities are recommending that they try to prevent mosquito bites while overseas, but also when they return.
The announcement came hours after Puerto Rico reported 1,914 new cases in the past week, a total of 10,690 since the first one was reported in December. One of the cases included a person who does not live in Miami’s one-square-mile “transmission zone”, in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, where the health department believes local transmission is taking place. In June, a caution was released for Puerto Rico by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that the Commonwealth could be witnessing dozens of cases of microcephaly in babies in the coming months.
Keystone said the Aedes mosquito is a daytime-biting insect most active in the morning and late afternoon, and using mosquito repellent and covering your body as much as possible in areas with Zika outbreaks is important.
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Williams County in northwest OH and Monroe County in southeast MI both have reported their first cases of travel-related Zika virus.
