Four people in Florida's Miami-Dade area have contracted the Zika virus, apparently from local mosquitoes, signaling the arrival of the virus in the mainland United States, the state health department announced on Friday.
Officials from the Florida Department of Health would not comment specifically on the cases, but in a release said, “the department believes that active transmission of the Zika virus are occurring in one small area in Miami-Dade County, just north of downtown.”
The area is about one square mile and health officials are going door-to-door alerting residents. They are also collecting urine samples of people in the area to determine whether more people have gotten the virus. Georgia has similar protocols if and when the virus arrives here.
Tom Frieden, head of the CDC, has said repeatedly that while it is possible to try to control mosquito populations, the two mosquitoes that carry the virus, the Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, are the "cockroaches of mosquitoes," and are impossible to completely eradicate. Both mosquitoes are found in Georgia.
So far, the Florida health department said, no mosquitoes collected in the immediate area of infection have shown signs of the virus. Still, health officials believe the cases are not from sexual transmission or travel related. Apparently, local doctors brought the cases to the health department’s attention after treating patients who believed they had been exposed to the virus.
Miami-Dade and Broward county areas are now rejecting blood donations from anyone who lives in the affected square mile area.
Zika, however, has spread rapidly in the Americas, and now that it's in Florida the disease presents a worrisome and frightening potential problem for Georgia. Though Zika has been related to two adult deaths, one in Puerto Rico and one travel related in Utah, Zika is most dangerous for pregnant women and people who are trying to get pregnant. Infected men and women can pass it along to their male or female partners through sex. The disease causes a range of devastating birth defects, including microcephaly, a condition that causes a fetus's skull to collapse around its under-developed brain. Already, at least 12 babies have been born in the U.S. with the condition, though those cases were largely believed to have been travel-related. As of last week, there were 46 confirmed travel-related cases of Zika in Georgia.
Congress adjourned earlier this month for seven without approving any funding to fight Zika, despite the Obama administration's request for $1.8 billion to fight the disease. Federal health officials have pleaded with Congress to approve the request, saying it is needed not only for vaccine research, but to help states prepare for the arrival of Zika.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hold a press conference later today to discuss the Florida cases and their implication for the rest of the nation.
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