“Zika is new,” said CDC Director Tom Frieden, “and new diseases can be scary, particularly when they affect the most vulnerable of us.” Frieden, giving grave testimony in a congressional hearing, said that in Puerto Rico today, [Zika] cases are doubling every week.” Dr. Frieden warns of a “limited window of opportunity” to contain the virus, since by June the “mosquito season is likely to start in parts of the US where the mosquito that can spread Zika is present.”
Friedan cites as a cautionary tale the Chikungunya outbreak in the Caribbean in 2014 which infected one out of four adults in Puerto Rico in eight months. If Zika spreads the same way Chikungunya spread, there could be “hundreds of thousands of infections” by the end of the year.
Learn about #Zika virus, how it spreads, sign up for email updates, and more: https://t.co/kglAHTxCvy pic.twitter.com/3vDe3kW52N
— Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrFriedenCDC) February 29, 2016
