Post Hurricane Matthew #ZikaWarning

WASHINGTON : BY FRANCO ORDOÑEZ contact fordonez@mcclatchydc.com

As the waters from Hurricane Matthew began to recede, coastal residents from Florida to the Carolinas may have something else to worry about: Zika.

The high winds broke through screen doors and windows, knocked out power and left behind small and large bodies of standing water that could serve as new breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Scientists raised concerns that the Zika virus that has touched down in South Florida is now a greater threat to expand and move up the coast.

“It knocks a lot of stuff down so you just have a lot more things in which the mosquito can breed,” said Philip Stoddard, a Florida International University biology professor and the mayor of South Miami. “A damaged rain gutter, for instance, now becomes a rain collector. Every little object that blows off a house or even a chair flipped over on a porch becomes a container for mosquitoes to breed.”
Most adult mosquitoes won’t survive the gusts of wind, and flooding will wash away young mosquitoes. Those that survive, however, will lay new eggs near standing water that will hatch over and grow over the next week, likely boosting the bug population.

Raising concerns for coastal communities in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas is that there was a spike in neurological disease cases associated with the West Nile Virus after Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, the cases of West Nile virus more than doubled in the hurricane affected areas of Louisiana and Mississippi, according to a 2008 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study.
“The immediate increase in cases may be attributed to increased human exposure to mosquitoes,” wrote Kevin A. Caillouët, a Tulane research fellow at the time, in the CDC report. “Tens of thousands of persons in the hurricane-affected region were living in damaged housing or were waiting outside for days to be evacuated.”
In Louisiana, no cases of West Nile virus were reported in the weeks leading up to Hurricane Katrina, but 11 were reported in the following three weeks where the storm hit. A similar pattern was seen in Mississippi, where 10 cases of West Nile were discovered in the three weeks after the storm.

Derric Nimmo, principal scientist for Oxitec, which has developed genetically modified mosquitoes that are being considered for release in Key West, said time will tell. It’ll take about a week for transmissions to rise as the mosquito population grows. But he said “risk is risk,” which also means transmissions may not increase.

“But if you pull those factors together, they got Zika, they got active transmissions, they got the mosquito,” he said. “The rain will dump a lot of water. Then the risk should be taken into consideration that it’s going to be relatively high that it might spread.”

Read more here: https://www.thestate.com/news/nation-world/national/article107108427.html#storylink=cpy