Mosquitoes in Florida likely infected four people with the zika virus, Florida officials said Friday.The likely outbreak is the first time zika was found to be transmitted via infected mosquitoes in the continental United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed.The Florida Department of Health said that one woman and three men who had the virus likely got the infection from local mosquitoes. For now, the department said it believes that active transmission of zika is happening only in a one-square-mile area in Miami-Dade County, just north of downtown.

The CDC said more than 1,650 cases of zika in the U.S. have been reported, but all of those were from travelers returning home after visiting other countries in the Americas and Caribbean.
Of those cases, 15 are believed to be the result of sexual transmission, and one was the result of a laboratory exposure, the CDC said. The center warned earlier this year that Florida and other Gulf Coast states could see a wave of local zika infections as temperatures rise and humidity climbs.

“We continue to recommend that everyone in areas where Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are present — and especially pregnant women — take steps to avoid mosquito bites," Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, said Friday in a statement. (…) The zika virus is known to cause birth defects and brain damage in children whose mothers were infected during pregnancy. The CDC in April confirmed that zika is to blame for a rise in newborns with microcephaly, or an unusually small skull. Of those 672 pregnant women, about 66 percent experienced zika-related symptoms, while 34 percent had no symptoms, the report said.The World Health Organization estimated zika could infect millions of people in dozens of countries. In Brazil, more than 1.5 million people have become infected since 2014. “We could control this, it just means we have to get rid of the mosquitoes in our backyards,” he said.

http://mashable.com/2016/07/29/zika-outbreak-florida/#_LVfIBf8Y5qz