Via The New York Times: Houston Braces for Another Brush With the Peril of Zika. Excerpt:
With 4.5 million people in a hot, muggy metropolis built atop a bayou, America’s fourth-largest city, Houston, is a perfect target for the mosquito-borne Zika virus. But it may be better prepared than any other urban center to stop an outbreak.
The city last year increased its mosquito-control budget by 33 percent. Officials are testing new high-tech traps and have plans to release genetically modified mosquitoes that produce short-lived offspring, reducing the population.
Should the virus start spreading here, officials are prepared to follow Miami’s example, beginning aerial spraying and house-to-house inspections to clear standing water in which mosquitoes breed.
“We’re much better prepared this year than we were last year,” said Mustapha Debboun, mosquito control director of Harris County, which includes Houston.
Almost everywhere, Year 2 of Zika is looking much less threatening than Year 1. But the risk posed by this virus is far from gone.
According to the Pan American Health Organization, the number of infections has declined precipitously in the Americas, except for Peru, Ecuador and Argentina.
Zika infections are down by more than 90 percent in the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico. Cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome paralysis, linked to infection with the virus, are also down to pre-epidemic levels.
Fewer infections overseas should mean fewer travelers returning to the United States with live virus in their blood, reducing the likelihood of an outbreak here.
Dr. Scott C. Weaver, a Zika expert at the University of Texas Medical Branch in nearby Galveston, described himself as “cautiously optimistic” that the epidemic was fading out.
Still, he warned, “it’s premature to conclude that the danger is over.” Data is limited on infections just over the border in Mexico, and the rainy season — prime time for mosquito breeding — has just begun in Central America and the Caribbean.
Still, it’s a far cry from the situation last year, when a surge of babies born with abnormally small heads in Brazil sowed an international panic. The birth defects were shown to be linked to infection with the Zika virus, transmitted to pregnant women by common household mosquitoes.
As the epidemic crept northward with warming weather, drug companies began testing more than 20 vaccines. The Obama White House fought a bitter battle with congressional Republicans over emergency funding, and the Gulf Coast, where similar mosquitoes had previously caused outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya, braced for the worst.
Ultimately, the country recorded about 5,100 cases, of which about 4,800 were acquired by travelers overseas. Florida reported 218 cases of locally acquired Zika infection, however, mostly in Miami. Texas recorded only six, all in the Brownsville area, abutting Mexico.
Thus far, 216 babies with severe Zika-related birth defects have been born or have died in the womb, 88 of them in the United States and 128 in its territories, mostly in Puerto Rico, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As winter returned, the disease receded from the headlines. This summer, there is no panic in cities like Houston, only uncertainty.
