Auburn University researchers including Assistant Professor of Disease Ecology Sarah Zohdy, supported by the Alabama Department of Public Health, conducted a focused program of mosquito trapping in 2016 and 2017 to identify what mosquitos are out there and what they’re carrying. Among the findings: The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which hadn’t been reported in Alabama for 26 years, was found in Mobile, Alabama. “It is very important that we have been able to collect aegypti,” she said, even though it’s not a complete surprise. The whole region is suitable aegypti habitat, Stevens said, and they’ve been here before. “About 30 years ago we had aegypti all over the state in high numbers,” she said. But then albopictus moved in and ran the old gang ou...

Watch out. The Asian tiger mosquitoes tend to be active and bite during the day unlike native mosquitoes and don’t require much water to breed. It’s the third year in a row adult Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) have been found here. “Because of climate change and because of the mosquitoes travelling to longer distances, the risk is there which is, I think, a new risk and our community needs to be aware of these new risks,” Acting Medical Officer of Health Dr. Wajid Ahmed said Tuesday.   In light of the May discovery, the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit is reminding the public to protect against mosquito bites by using insect repellant, wearing light-coloured clothing and getting rid of even small amounts of standing water in your yard. The Asian tiger mosquitoes tend ...

The CDC reports 3,988 confirmed cases of Zika in the United States and in D.C. In U.S. territories, there are 30,074 cases of the virus. According to the CDC, 1,005 of the cases in the United States are in pregnant woman. There are 2,263 pregnant women in U.S. territories with the virus.

Reuters’ reports from Bangkok that Thailand is investigating four suspected cases of Zika-related microcephaly in three babies and a 36-week old unborn baby, the public health minister said on Tuesday, in what could be the first cases of Zika-linked microcephaly in Southeast Asia. Several countries in Southeast Asia have reported increasing cases of infection from the mosquito-borne Zika virus but Thailand has one of the highest numbers in the region, with 349 confirmed since January, including 25 pregnant women. Public Health Minister Piyasakon Sakolsatayadorn said authorities needed to be thorough in their investigation of the cases as confirmation would be “sensitive”.

ABC news reports that the Zika virus has been found in fluid around the eyes of some patients, shedding new light on how the virus affects healthy adults, according to a study published today in Journal for the American Medical Association Ophthalmology. The eyes of six patients infected in South America were swabbed by researchers from the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Public Health in China. When they tested their eye fluids, they found Zika virus RNA. “Here we have some evidence when the adult is infected, it would appear that highly specialized neural tissue is infected,” Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University Medical School, told ABC News.

The New York Times has reported that Florida announced on Thursday that, for the first time, mosquitoes in Miami Beach had tested positive for the Zika virus, a disappointing confirmation that the virus is still active in the area. Florida is the only place in the continental United States where Zika is actively circulating, but the virus is spreading. The Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads Zika is famously difficult to fight, and experts often say that testing the bugs to find the virus is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The three samples that tested positive all came from a 1.5-square-mile area in Miami Beach where locally acquired cases of Zika had been confirmed. The significance of the results depends on where the mosquitoes were collected, said Scott C. Weaver, the director...

More than two billion people could be at risk from Zika virus outbreaks in parts of Africa and Asia, according to scientists writing in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. The research team, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Oxford University and the University of Toronto, Canada, said “vast numbers” of people were living in environments where it would be hard to prevent, detect and respond to the virus. Populations in India, Indonesia and Nigeria are some of the most vulnerable to transmission, the researchers said. They used data on air traveller numbers to help model their predictions.

An Emerging Threat. Mosquito-borne diseases in Europe. There has been growing interest in Europe in recent years in the establishment and spread of invasive mosquitoes, notably the incursion of Aedes albopictus through the international trade in used tires and lucky bamboo, with onward spread within Europe through ground transport. More recently, five other non-European aedine mosquito species have been found in Europe, and in some cases populations have established locally and are spreading. Concerns have been raised about the involvement of these mosquito species in transmission cycles of pathogens of public health importance, and these concerns were borne out following the outbreak of chikungunya fever in Italy in 2007, and subsequent autochthonous cases of dengue fever in France and Cr...

Florida reported a new homegrown case of Zika virus Wednesday, this one in Palm Beach County. The state’s now running 10 different investigations into 43 local cases of Zika infection, including two outbreaks: one in Miami and one in Miami Beach. On Tuesday, a case was reported on Florida’s Gulf coast. It’s not a surprise that Florida has cases of Zika. The Aedes mosquitoes that spread the virus thrive in the warm, humid state almost year-round, and Florida has many travellers back and forth from the badly affected countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. But the appearance of so many cases in such a short time is worrying for a state that relies heavily on tourists, and the governor’s office has been in heavy damage-control mode, stressing mosquito control eff...

“The brain that should be there is not there”. A study of brain scans and ultrasound pictures of 45 Brazilian babies whose mothers were infected with Zika in pregnancy shows that the virus can inflict serious damage to many different parts of the foetal brain beyond microcephaly, the condition of unusually small heads that has become the sinister signature of Zika. The images, published Tuesday in the journal Radiology, also suggest a grim possibility: Because some of the damage was seen in brain areas that continue to develop after birth, it may be that babies born without obvious impairment will experience problems as they grow. “It really brings to the forefront the importance of truly understanding the impact of Zika virus and the fact that we need to follow children who not only are e...