Kentucky officials in areas from public health to agriculture are launching a Zika virus awareness and prevention program. The start-up, announced Monday, comes before any reported cases of local transmission of the mosquito-borne disease.
Zika is known to cause birth defects in some babies born to infected women during pregnancy.
During the official kickoff of the Zika prevention program, “live,” but not infected mosquitos were a part of one station demonstration. “This is the way we feed them. This is the way we rear them in the laboratory. So, we stick our arm in here,” explained Grayson Brown who directs the Public Health Entomology Lab at the University of Kentucky.
There have been no known cases of Zika transmission in Kentucky. “The key is gonna be whether or not we start getting human cases of Zika north of Orlando because that’s where the species transition occurs,” offered Brown.
There have been six Zika cases in Kentucky, but those were all in people who traveled to highly-infected areas south of the U.S. Infectious disease specialist Ardis Hoven says local transmission could occur if a recently-infected person is bitten by a mosquito in Kentucky. “A local eighties mosquito bites them, the mosquito will get infected and then bites the next door neighbor,” said Hoven.
Increased mosquito spraying is anticipated this summer. David Wayne with the State Department of Agriculture says the chemical used in such spraying doesn’t pose a big health threat to humans. He says it breaks down quickly and is completely gone in nine to ten hours. ?
