Miami Beach Zika Cases May Prompt Call to Avoid City – New York Times

On Thursday, the health official with knowledge of the new developments said that in Miami Beach, there are “a handful of cases” of likely local transmission that involve people who were in “close proximity to each other,” including two new cases that the Florida Department of Health announced Thursday. The official insisted on anonymity, saying that details about the location and any travel guidance for pregnant women are not likely to be officially announced until Friday at the earliest.

The official said that expanding the travel advisory broadly would not indicate that health officials think that the Zika virus was spreading rapidly throughout the county or Miami Beach. Rather, it would be “for the sake of almost simplification to make it easy for people to understand the geographic area,” the official said.

“Now that we have a second area of local transmission, I think officials wouldn’t be surprised to see in the coming weeks another area,” the official added. “So in an effort to simplify things and get ahead, there are discussions about expanding the area to possibly include the county or other parts of the Miami area.”

Jackie Schutz, Gov. Rick Scott’s communications director, said Thursday that public health officials “have not confirmed a new zone of active transmission,” besides the one-square-mile area in Wynwood, a neighborhood in Miami, that has been designated a zone of active local transmission of the Zika virus since Aug. 1. She added, “there are multiple cases being investigated.”

So far, 25 of the 35 cases of suspected local transmission that Florida health officials have announced have ties to the Wynwood neighborhood, most of them linked to two small businesses.

Video

Enlisting Mosquitoes to Fight Zika

Mara Gambineri, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Health, said the department “still believes active transmissions are still only occurring in the area that is less than one square mile in Miami-Dade County.” She added, “If investigations reveal additional areas of likely active transmission, the department will announce a defined area of concern.”

The mayor of Miami Beach, Philip Levine, said that state officials had not confirmed to him that there were cases in Miami Beach. But he said, “There could be a link to Miami Beach.” He added, “We can expect to see Zika popping up here and there, but it’s not an epidemic.”

The health official interviewed Thursday said Florida officials might be waiting to announce the new cluster until a decision was made about how large an area would be included in any new travel advisory, something that officials from the state and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were discussing Thursday night.

“At a minimum is expanding the travel advisory to Miami Beach,” the health official said. “What’s on the table right now is Miami Beach and making it bigger than Miami Beach. There are discussions about the whole of Miami-Dade County.”

The C.D.C. had not issued a statement as of Thursday night, and agency officials said it would do so only after the State of Florida released more details about a new cluster and location.

A city of 92,000 people, Miami Beach sits on a series of barrier islands east of Miami. Its crystalline waters, night clubs, restaurants and hip hotels make it one of the biggest tourist hot spots in the state.

About seven million tourists stayed in Miami Beach hotels in 2015, and others visited without staying there, according to the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. About half are international tourists, with Brazil leading the way.

On Thursday, the health official with knowledge of the discussions said that any updated travel guidance would probably be similar to the advisory for Wynwood. Pregnant women were advised not to travel there and women who lived or worked in the zone, and their partners, were advised to protect themselves from mosquito bites and to practice protected sex.

Among those affected by an advisory would be Batsheva Wulfsohn, who is seven and a half months pregnant, and her husband, Zak Stern. The couple live in Miami Beach, and Mr. Stern runs a bakery in Wynwood.

“I’m still searching for that reasonable reaction to something that is still quite mysterious in its effects,” said Mr. Stern, who had not heard about the Miami Beach cases on Thursday. “My wife is trying to kind of balance doing everything she can as a responsible mother, while not allowing herself to be crippled in fear all day.”

It is exactly that kind of balance that public health officials have also been striving for, said Dr. William Schaffner, the head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University’s medical school.

In issuing travel warnings, he said, “they don’t want to do social and culture and economic harm and they don’t want to do medical and public health harm by indicating that people are at risk when the risk may be very, very low.”

The authorities have limited travel advisories to Wynwood because it was linked to multiple cases, and because the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits Zika, can travel only short distances, does not live long and does not pass the virus to its larvae, he said. Also, in two other viruses the mosquito transmits, dengue and chikungunya, a mosquito has usually infected only one person, not many, he said.

“But the world is sometimes a little messier” than scientific precedent would suggest, he said. So far, health officials “have been making reasonable decisions, and we have all wondered what’s it going to take for them to expand the travel advisory,” he added. “They tread a fine line between really aggressive and being really cautious.”

Continue reading the main story