Global Health

With the growing Zika outbreak in Florida, it's a dangerous mistake to continue underestimating the virus. 

Complacency is the enemy.  (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

usnews.com - by Stephen S. Morse - August 1, 2016

We've seen it coming for months. Zika has been moving with hurricane intensity throughout South America and the Caribbean, appearing for the first time in 42 countries in the Western Hemisphere in less than two years. . . .

. . . We cannot afford to keep trying to catch-up every time another infection appears. . . .

. . . Zika is the infectious disease crisis now, but in our increasingly globalized and urban world, we can expect many more to come.

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Seventy-two nomadic herders, including 41 children, were hospitalised in far north Russia after the region began experiencing abnormally high temperatures

A family is seen 150km from the town of Salekhard, Russia on 2 May 2016. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

theguardian.com - by Alec Luhn - August 1, 2016

A 12-year-old boy in the far north of Russia has died in an outbreak of anthrax that experts believe was triggered when unusually warm weather caused the release of the bacteria.

The boy was one of 72 nomadic herders, including 41 children, hospitalised in the town of Salekhard in the Arctic Circle, after reindeer began dying en masse from anthrax.

Five adults and two other children have been diagnosed with the disease, which is known as “Siberian plague” in Russian and was last seen in the region in 1941.

More than 2,300 reindeer have died, and at least 63 people have been evacuated from a quarantine area around the site of the outbreak.

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Image: Senate minority leader Harry Reid, one of the senators who has demanded Republicans reconvene Congress for Zika funding. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

theguardian.com - July 31st 2016 - Joanna Walters

Senate Democrats have called for Congress to end its recess and immediately approve emergency funds for combating the Zika virus in America, after Florida reported its first cases of mosquito-borne infections on the mainland, and funding for mosquito nets for pregnant women started running low.

Near downtown Miami, teams of doctors were going door to door on Saturday to alert an estimated 30,000 residents, particularly pregnant women, of the risks of being bitten by local mosquitoes believed to be carrying the virus.

On Friday, Florida governor Rick Scott and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that four new cases of the disease in the Miami area were almost certainly contracted through local insect bites.

submitted by Albert Gomez

cnn.com - by Debra Goldschmidt - July 29, 2016

(CNN) Four individuals in Miami-Dade and Broward counties have been infected with the Zika virus by local mosquitoes, Florida health officials said Friday.

These are the first known cases of the virus being transmitted by mosquitoes in the continental United States.

The unidentified individuals had not traveled to a Zika-affected area, had not had sexual contact with someone who had traveled to a place where the virus is circulating and had no other known exposure to the virus.

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