DALLAS (AP) — Health officials are going door-to-door in the Texas neighborhood of a woman who is thought to be the first person to contract the Zika virus by getting bitten by a mosquito in that state. ADVERTISING DALLAS (AP)
DALLAS (AP) — Health officials are going door-to-door in the Texas neighborhood of a woman who is thought to be the first person to contract the Zika virus by getting bitten by a mosquito in that state.
Officials are offering to test the woman’s neighbors in Brownsville, which is on the border with Mexico, and are educating them about how to fight the spread of the disease, including how to reduce the breeding habitats of the mosquito that transmits it — the Aedes aegypti. But experts don’t expect big outbreaks in the U.S. such as those that happened in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Thus far, Florida is the only other state with homegrown cases of the disease. It typically causes only mild symptoms, at worst, but the disease is especially dangerous to pregnant women, as it can cause severe birth defects, including babies born with unusually small heads.
State health officials announced the Brownsville case Monday, noting testing showed that at this point, the virus can no longer be spread from her by mosquitoes.
Though Brownsville is on the Mexico border, the woman said she hadn’t recently traveled to Mexico or anywhere that was experiencing a Zika outbreak, and she didn’t have any other risk factors, health officials said. She isn’t pregnant.
Officials said further investigation is necessary to figure out how she was infected. But Chris Van Deusen, a spokesman for the Texas Department of State Health Services, said the most likely scenario is that someone who got infected in an area where Zika is widespread traveled to South Texas and was bitten by a mosquito, which later bit the woman.
Through last week, Texas has had 257 confirmed Zika cases that were all associated with travel, including two infants born to women who traveled while pregnant and two people who had sex with infected travelers.
Meanwhile in Florida, since people began contracting the Zika virus in the Miami area during the summer, there have been 240 such cases in the state. Two areas were since cleared as being part of the transmission zone, and it’s still spreading in two other areas.
Florida Department of Health spokeswoman Mara Gambineri said there has been a decrease in the last few weeks in locally transmitted cases, and that while it doesn’t get cold enough to eliminate all mosquitoes, there are fewer as it gets cooler.
