The trendy Wynwood district in Miami’s urban center has become ground zero in the fight against the Zika virus in the U.S., with fumigators attacking the carrier mosquito street by street while residents and businesses remain on high alert.

 

The chief thoroughfare of Wynwood, a setting for art galleries, restaurants and chic stores, appeared calm Tuesday with the usual amount of visitors wandering along the colorful graffiti displays of Wynwood Walls, though now the TV networks have sent their camera crews here to report the news.

 

While the 14 cases of people infected with Zika right here in the U.S. have all occurred in an area of Wynwood just 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) in diameter, fumigation teams have undertaken an exhaustive task “in every corner of the neighborhood, to stop it” from spreading, a young fumigator, who preferred to remain anonymous, told EFE on Tuesday.

 

It was precisely on Tuesday that the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Tom Frieden, warned that wiping out the Aedes aegypti mosquito in the affected area is proving harder than expected, perhaps because of the mosquitoes’ possible immunity to insecticides.

 

Carmen Negrete, 56, is very concerned by the outbreak of the Zika virus in the district because the danger can affect her business of selling hot dogs in the streets to residents, employees and tourists, as she has done for the past 10 years.

 

But with a cheerful kind of stoicism, Elio Delgado, 82, who has lived in Wynwood for 52 years, is convinced that “life in the neighborhood is divine,” and doesn’t believe Zika will change a thing.

 

The CDC this Monday included Wynwood on the list of destinations where visitors should take extra precautions due to the risk of Zika infection, which has been associated with cases of microcephaly and neurological afflictions.

 

The CDC recommends that pregnant women not visit the area or that they take special precautions if they live there. The recommendation to women who have been in Wynwood after June 15 is to abstain from getting pregnant for at least eight weeks.

Miami, Aug 2 (EFE)

 

As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star, at least two cases of Zika virus infections in the United States have been attributed to tourists bitten by mosquitoes while visiting Costa Rica. One case was diagnosed in Massachusetts; the other in North Dakota.

 

In the U.S., the CDC estimates that the Aedes aegypti mosquito could spread from Florida as far north as New Jersey and all across the Southern and Southeastern states. The worst-case scenario would be to surpass Costa Rica’s 2016 count of Zika infections, which currently stand at 295.