Manatee County officials say they’re ready for Zika

With four out of five Zika cases being asymptomatic, there is the risk that some local transmissions could appear in Manatee County without warning, the Manatee County Mosquito Control director says.

But should a local transmission of Zika appear in Manatee County, the county’s Mosquito Control is “ready to react,” Mark Latham told the county commission on Tuesday.

“We are only being informed potentially of one out of five true cases, so there is that risk there that some local transmissions are going to pop out of nowhere without us having any forewarning,” he said during a Zika briefing for the commission. “Should we have local transmissions, we have capabilities of doing all that we need to do locally without having to employ contractors or get the CDC involved. We are very well equipped for that.”

As of Tuesday morning, there have been two travel-acquired Zika cases reportd in Manatee County, but there have been about seven or eight additional suspect cases, according to Latham. The two cases in Manatee County are not pregnant women.

“We treat even a suspect case. We will go out as if it a true case of Zika,” he said. “We don’t want to waste any time so we will go out.”

Whenever the Florida Department of Health in Manatee County gets a suspect Zika case, they notify Mosquito Control to go out to the area even before they get the results back on whether it is a confirmed case, according to Dr. Jennifer Bencie, director of the local health department.

“We are looking and monitoring all of our resources that we can utilize in the community if we need to go to a next level of education, information in the particular community if we get a locally transmitted case,” she said.

If someone has been to Miami, where there have been local transmissions of Zika, they can now request the Zika test, according to Carrie Harder, director of disease control at the health department.

“Zika is reportable upon suspicion,” she said. “When the symptoms and travel history align, we get the information right away and we report it to Mark’s team.”

Mosquito Control relies on the reporting of suspect human cases as the “first warning that there is a potential disease threat in that area,” Latham said.

“We feel very strongly as soon as we get a notice of any significant problem we can nib in the bud very quickly,” he said. “We have the resources.”

This story was originally published August 9, 2016 at 2:31 PM with the headline "Manatee County officials say they’re ready for Zika."