美国国家公共电台 NPR Zika Cases Surge In Puerto Rico As Mosquitoes Flourish

Zika Cases Surge In Puerto Rico As Mosquitoes Flourish

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Puerto Rico is reporting more than a thousand new confirmed cases of Zika each week, and things are expected to get worse before they get better. NPR's Jason Beaubien is in Puerto Rico, and he's finding the challenges to fighting this mosquito-borne virus are huge.

JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE 1: Hiram Torres is standing 2 next to a chain-link fence, peering into a dump site west of the capital, San Juan. Torres, the co-founder of Puerto Rico Limpio, a group that's trying to clean up landfills, is pointing out how the rainwater runs off a mound 3 of garbage and then collects in stagnant 4 pools.

HIRAM TORRES: And that water has nowhere to go, so it just...

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Nowhere to go...

TORRES: It just sits there.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: ...It just sits there, exactly.

BEAUBIEN: Torres says this landfill and its pools of water are perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes that can carry Zika.

TORRES: I don't know if you're feeling it, but I - I'm starting to feel mosquitoes, you know, start biting us, and we've just been standing here for a couple of minutes.

BEAUBIEN: The key to getting rid of the aedes aegypti mosquito, which carries Zika, is to get rid of the pools of water where it breeds. But right now, in the rainy season in Puerto Rico, that's pretty hard to do.

TYLER SHARP: We are right now, probably, in the month or six weeks of peak transmission.

BEAUBIEN: Tyler Sharp is the lead epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Zika operation in Puerto Rico.

SHARP: The more rains you get, the more mosquitoes you get. The more mosquitoes, the higher the rate of transmission. And also the mosquitoes like warmer temperatures and are able to replicate 5 the virus more efficiently 6 at at least slightly higher temperatures.

BEAUBIEN: He calls August in Puerto Rico the Goldilocks zone for virus replication. The island has already had nearly 8,000 confirmed cases of Zika. The CDC predicts that by the end of the year, 20 to 25 percent of the entire population could be infected with the virus. Many of those people will only have mild or no symptoms. But such a widespread outbreak means that thousands of pregnant women could be exposed and their unborn babies might be at risk of having severe Zika-related birth defects.

And the tools to fight Zika are limited. Sharp notes that in the previous outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya here, public health officials were never able to stop those outbreaks while they were in progress. Zika is even more complicated because it's transmitted by both mosquitoes and sexually.

SHARP: So we have things that we think can be effective. We know that individuals can take approaches to avoid their risk of infection. But in terms of breaking the epidemic 7 or stopping transmission, there is nothing that we know about that has been, you know, scientifically evidenced to show that this will work, that this is the solution.

BEAUBIEN: Even the insecticides that are being used to spray homes or fog some high-risk neighborhoods, those chemicals have been losing their punch. Mosquitoes have been developing resistance to them.

SHARP: What we've seen in Puerto Rico, as we see in many regions, is that there's a wide variety of resistance not to all insecticides but to many of them.

BEAUBIEN: The CDC had recommended aerial spraying against the mosquitoes, but that was blocked by the governor over environmental concerns. Sharp says the efforts against Zika in Puerto Rico rely primarily on people - people protecting themselves from mosquito bites and people getting rid of mosquito breeding grounds. The only good news is that if previous outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya are any guide, the high levels of Zika transmission here should start coming down in September or October. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, San Juan.