Zika Fears, Misunderstandings Hard To Swat Away

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Publish Date:
August 21, 2016
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Source:
The Washington Times
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Summary

Despite a mosquito hot spot that popped up last week in Miami Beach, Florida, Zika remains overwhelmingly a travel-related disease, challenging the public’s understanding of the infection and policymakers’ attempts to manage the outbreak.

Two Miami-area neighborhoods are reporting mosquito-borne cases, with a total of 36 infections as of Friday. That’s still less than 2 percent of the more than 2,000 cases throughout the continental U.S. The rest of them were contracted outside the country or by sexual contact with an infected person.

“The big threat was, and remains, an epidemic spreading among the scores of millions of Americans who live in states with lots of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes,” said Hank Greely, a law professor and director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “To me, it makes sense to work hard to avoid the somewhat less likely but more devastating scenario of widespread domestic spread, but we certainly can’t ignore the people who contracted it overseas.”

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