Manatee reports third case of travel-related Zika virus

Manatee County officially has registered its third case of travel-related Zika virus.

There were 15 new travel-related cases of Zika reported on Wednesday and Manatee had one of them, raising Manatee’s total to three, according to the Florida Department of Health.

 

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The 15 cases included three in Orange, three in Pinellas, three in Polk, two in Broward, one in Hillsborough, one in Pasco, one in Volusia and the one in Manatee, the health department reported.

As of Wednesday, there are now 523 cases of travel-related Zika in Florida, along with 43 cases of non-travel related infections and 70 infections involving pregnant women, according to the DOH.

A new local infection in Palm Beach is the county’s second mosquito-borne transmission this month, and it is unrelated to an earlier case reported there, according to the Department of Health

Health officials did not say if the second local infection in Palm Beach occurred within a one-square-mile area of the first case — a development that, under the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines, could lead to the declaration of a third area of active transmission in Florida.

CDC guidelines define a local outbreak as two or more people infected with Zika who do not share a household, with travel and sexual transmission ruled out, and who acquired the disease within one-square-mile over a period of two weeks or more.

In all, Florida has reported 43 local Zika infections so far, with nearly all in Miami-Dade except one case each in Broward and Pinellas counties and the two in Palm Beach.

Over the past month, the CDC and state health department have identified two zones in Miami-Dade as the only areas in Florida where mosquitoes are actively spreading Zika: a one-square-mile section of Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, and a 1.5-square-mile zone in Miami Beach.

Florida health officials are conducting 10 investigations into local spread of Zika, including seven in Miami-Dade, two in Palm Beach and one in Pinellas after a mosquito-borne infection was announced there on Tuesday.

State epidemiologists have closed their investigations into two cases, one in Miami-Dade and a second in Broward. And on Tuesday, the health department said investigators had gathered enough information to close two additional investigations in Miami-Dade outside of the Wynwood and Miami Beach zones. Both cases were determined to have stopped with a single person.

As epidemiologists go door-to-door in the three counties where the health department is investigating, Miami-Dade mosquito control officials said their efforts to knock down the insects in Wynwood are succeeding.

At a morning news conference Wednesday, Miami-Dade County Mosquito Control Director Chalmers Vasquez said efforts to combat mosquitoes on Miami Beach, where high-rise condos dot the skyline and interfere with aerial spraying, may be more difficult.

“We want to fight this battle on the ground,” he said of Miami Beach.

This story was originally published August 24, 2016 at 1:31 PM with the headline "Manatee reports third case of travel-related Zika virus."