The U.S. Needs New Strategies To Fight Zika Mosquitos

U.S. states and cities need to adopt a different mosquito-fighting strategy to battle the species carrying the Zika virus as an outbreak that started in Brazil heads north with warmer weather in the coming weeks, health officials said on Friday. The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency in February as the virus spread rapidly in the Americas, citing Zika's link to the birth defect microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disorder in adults that can cause paralysis. The mosquito species responsible for spreading the virus by biting people lives in and around homes, making traditional evening insecticide fogging campaigns from sprayers mounted on trucks an ineffective option, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials said. CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden said health departments need to take a "four corners approach," targeting the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes indoors and outdoors as well as focusing on killing both larvae and adult insects. "We think we can at least have significant knockdown and potentially significant disease control," Frieden told state and local health officials and others taking part in a "Zika Action Plan Summit" at the agency's Atlanta headquarters. Most mosquito abatement efforts in U.S. states target nuisance mosquitoes, those that bite at dusk and ruin picnics and barbecues but pose little public health threat. But Aedes aegypti is a daytime biter that dines exclusively on humans, biting several people...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news