Pregnant Women Advised to Avoid Travel to Active Zika Zone in Miami Beach – New York Times

Health officials have been predicting for months that Zika would arrive in the continental United States, especially in warm mosquito havens like Florida. And despite Friday’s developments, they said they remain confident that the virus will not turn into a major epidemic in the continental United States as it has across Latin America and the Caribbean. The widespread use of air-conditioning and window screens helps reduce the risk of mosquito bites.

The vast majority of Zika cases have been and will continue to be in people who have traveled to the other countries where the virus has spread widely, or have had sexual relations with someone who traveled to those places, officials said. There have been 2,260 cases of Zika reported in the continental United States and Hawaii, including 529 in pregnant women, the C.D.C. said Friday.

So far, 36 cases of locally transmitted Zika have been identified, all in Florida, and 25 of them are linked to an area around two small businesses in Wynwood, north of downtown Miami. On Aug. 1, the C.D.C. advised pregnant women not to travel to a one-square-mile area in Wynwood. And while Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Health Department have announced that 17 blocks of that area have been found to be clear of Zika transmission, the C.D.C. maintains that the one-square-mile section should still be considered an active Zika zone, Dr. Petersen said.

Mr. Scott also struck a different note from the federal health officials about the risks of Zika posed to Miami-Dade County, a sprawling multicultural metropolis of 2.7 million people. He minimized the extent of the spread, saying in a news conference, “We have two small areas. One less than a mile, and we’ve already been able to reduce the footprint. We have another area now that’s 1.5 miles on Miami Beach. That’s out of a state that takes 15 hours to drive from Key West to Pensacola, so let’s put things in perspective.”

His communications director, Jackie Schutz, said Friday that Mr. Scott “is encouraging people to come to Miami, to come to South Beach. Just remove standing water and wear bug spray.”

But Dr. Frieden noted that there have been several other cases of suspected local transmission in Miami-Dade County that are believed to be isolated cases. Other cases will likely crop up, he said.

Video

Governor Says 5 Cases of Zika in Miami Beach

“What we’re doing is stepping back and saying there have been now multiple areas of individual transmission,” he said. “It’s a large county. There are more than two million people there, more than 20,000 pregnant women. We would always err on the side of caution.”

The C.D.C. generally must defer to state officials to decide where to set the boundaries around an area of potential disease transmission and what travel warnings to issue, federal officials and health experts said.

“The state has authority within its borders and it takes advice and counsel from the C.D.C.,” said Dr. William Schaffner, head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University’s medical school.

The realization that Miami Beach was a zone of Zika transmission was triggered by a news release from Taiwan that C.D.C. officials noticed on Wednesday, Dr. Petersen said. Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control reported that a 44-year-old woman who visited Miami for business in early August, sought medical treatment for a rash on her legs and abdomen. The woman, who is not pregnant, tested positive for Zika.

“We tried repeatedly to get in touch with Taiwan the minute we heard about this,” Dr. Petersen said. With the time difference, C.D.C. officials were not able to talk to Taiwanese officials until 6 a.m. Thursday. What they learned, he said, “ provided pretty strong evidence that these other people who had gone to multiple places” including Miami Beach, had probably been infected there.

Although the four other people had not stayed in the same hotel, he said, the places they had visited in Miami Beach “clustered in a fairly tight area.”

So far, local leaders and people involved in tourism said they have not seen panic, though there is concern.

Grace Della, the owner of Miami Culinary Tours, a company that leads daily food-focused group tours around Miami, said she canceled her Wynwood tours for the first two weeks in August, but restarted them last Saturday. Now, she said, she is continuing with her two-and-a-half-hour South Beach Food Tour, which runs daily, because she received an email from the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau that the city is safe.

But, she said, “I have received emails from women saying that they are pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant, and are concerned about coming to Miami, and I am happy to give them a refund and also to anyone else who wants one.”

Josh Alexander, a travel specialist at the New York City-based Protravel International, said that clients have been canceling their plans.

“They don’t want to go anywhere near Florida in general,” he said. “I have had cancellations to the Florida Keys and am getting calls from families who are booked to go to Disney in December.”

And Mayor Carlos A. Giménez of Miami-Dade County, said “I’m concerned about the impact on the economy, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.”

Although many elected officials fretted Friday about the potential economic consequences of the virus’s spread, some said public health must come before tourism, among them Mayor Cindy Lerner of Pinecrest, a village of 19,000 people in Miami-Dade County.

“I think all of us are holding our breath and crossing our fingers that it doesn’t continue to expand,” she said. “But you can’t build a wall or a net.”

Continue reading the main story