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The trendy Miami
neighborhood in June became the first neighborhood in the
continental United States with a local outbreak of Zika, a
mosquito-borne virus that can cause severe birth defects in
infected pregnant women.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday
declared Wynwood free of Zika, saying there had been no cases of
infection with the virus there in the past 45 days. Even so, the
federal agency urged pregnant women to consider putting off
nonessential travel to the neighborhood to avoid risk of
infection.
On a conference call with reporters on Friday, CDC Director Tom
Frieden said infections in Wynwood appeared to stop soon after
aerial applications of naled, a chemical long used in the United
States to kill adult mosquitoes, and of a larvicide called Bti
that is a naturally occurring bacterium.
The combination of pesticides that separately target adults and
larvae of the mosquito that carries Zika, called Aedes aegypti,
was unprecedented, he said.
"This is a new tool in our toolkit and the strongest one we
have" against the mosquito and the diseases it carries, he said,
which also include the dengue and chikungunya viruses.
(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson; Editing by Richard Chang)
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