Haitian Diaspora in South Florida beware - Chikungunya is coming...

I hate to say it but it looks like the Chikungunya spreading mosquito just got a visa and airline ticket to the United States... LOL... Experts are warning that the mosquito-borne virus rapidly spreading in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean may become a public health issue for Florida...


Aedes aegypti - Chikungunya spreading mosquito

On March 11 2014, there was a story on MyFoxOrlando.com about how easily Chikungunya would spread to Florida since it was already making waves in the Caribbean... Basically somebody travels to the Caribbean, gets infected, comes back to Florida, gets bitten by a local mosquito, then BOOM... Local mosquito gets infected and starts biting other people.

If it's that easy, then Chikungunya is probably there already, but not yet a "public health nuisance" as the Miami Herald said in a recent article.

By March 19, Florida State Health Department reported that the Chikungunya detected in 3 counties in Florida: Miami-Dade County, Broward County, Hillsborough County, according to natureworldnews.com

Recently, the Miami Herald said that Florida reported 10 cases through the CDC's national arboviral surveillance system but these cases came from travelers returning from the Caribbean territories of Dominica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Martinique, Saint Martin and Sint Maarten, and Indonesia in Southeast Asia.

So far, no case has been reported of people catching the disease in Florida, the Herald says but, with the rainy season coming, the breeding grounds of mosquitoes increase exponentially...

Will Florida experience Chikungunya like we are doing down here in Haiti? Let's wait and see...

So far, every household I've been to in Haiti has or know someone infected with Chikungunya.

What do you think about this?

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