Zika on the march in Florida Disaster site gets clean eco future
Women who are pregnant are being warned not to travel to Miami after virus hits a new community.
Mosquitoes have apparently begun spreading the Zika virus on the United States mainland for the first time, health officials say, a longfeared turn in the epidemic that is sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean.
Four recently infected people in the Miami area – a woman and three men – were believed to have contracted the virus locally through mosquito bites, Florida Governor Rick Scott said yesterday.
No mosquitoes in Florida have so far been found to be carrying Zika, despite the testing of 19,000 by the state laboratory. But other methods of transmission, such as travel to a stricken country or sex with an infected person, have been ruled out.
‘‘Zika is now here,’’ said Dr Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Still, US health officials said they did not expect widespread outbreaks like those seen in Brazil, in part because of better sanitation, better mosquito control, and wider use of window screens and air conditioners.
The virus has triggered alarm across the Western Hemisphere’s warmer latitudes. While most people who get Zika don’t know they are sick, infection during pregnancy can cause severe brainrelated birth defects, including microcephaly, where babies are born with abnormally small heads.
More than 1650 people in the mainland US have been infected with Zika in recent months, nearly all while travelling abroad.
‘‘This is not just a Florida issue. It’s a national issue – we just happen to be at the forefront,’’ Scott said.
Florida agricultural officials immediately announced more aggressive mosquito control efforts, and Florida politicians have rushed to assure tourists that it is still safe to visit the state.
Some medical experts said pregnant women should not travel to the Miami area, especially if the visit involved spending time outdoors. The CDC is not issuing such advice, however.
Health officials said the US might see small clusters of infections. But ‘‘we don’t expect widespread said.
The four Florida infections were thought to have occurred in a small area just north of downtown Miami, in the Wynwood arts district, Scott said. The area is rapidly gentrifying and has a number of construction sites where standing water can collect and serve as a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
People in Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward counties were being tested to find out whether there were more cases, Scott said.
‘‘If I were a pregnant woman right now, I would go on the assumption that there’s mosquito transmission all over the Miami transmission in the continental United States’’, Frieden area,’’ warned Dr Peter Hotez, a tropical medicine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
He said there were probably more cases that had not been diagnosed, and that people should not be surprised if mosquitoes were soon found to be spreading Zika in Louisiana and Texas as well.
Earlier this week, federal authorities told blood centres in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale areas to stop collecting blood until they can screen it for the virus.
Zika symptoms can include lowgrade fever, rash, joint pain, headaches and inflamed eyes, and typically last seven to 10 days. None of the four people infected in Florida were showing symptoms any more, officials said.
Frieden said the evidence suggested that the mosquito-borne transmission occurred several weeks ago over several city blocks.
It was not unusual that no mosquitoes had tested positive for Zika, said C Roxanne Connelly, a medical entomology specialist at the University of Florida and a past president of the American Mosquito Control Association.
It could take a couple of weeks before an infected person showed symptoms, and by then the mosquitoes that transmitted the virus were dead, she said. ‘‘Sometimes you don’t know where these people were infected.’’ The contaminated nuclear wasteland around Chernobyl could be turned into one of the world’s largest solar farms, producing nearly a third of the electricity that the stricken nuclear plant generated at its height 30 years ago, according to the Ukrainian government.
In a presentation sent to major banks and seen by The Guardian, 6000 hectares of ‘‘idle’’ land in Chernobyl’s 1000-square-kilometre exclusion zone, which is considered too dangerous for people to live in or farm, could be used for solar and biogas heat and power generation.
Pressure has been mounting for years to allow industrial development in the area, but no indication has been given of where the solar panels would be located.
‘‘There has been a change in the perception of the exclusion zone in Ukraine. Thirty years after the Chernobyl tragedy, [it] reveals opportunities for development. A special industrial area is to be created in compliance with all rules and regulations of radiation safety within the exclusion zone,’’ says the presentation.
Immediately after the 1986 accident, tens of thousands of people in Ukraine, Belarus and southern Russia were evacuated from a wide area around the nuclear plant and places where the radioactive plume descended. A few hundred people still live in 11 semi-deserted villages close to Chernobyl.
There is ‘‘about 6000 hectares of idle land, some of which can be used for placement of electrical generation facilities, and some for energy crops’’, according to the presentation.
The Ukrainian government said more than 1000 megawatts of solar and 400MW of other renewable energy could be generated. The nuclear plant had a capacity of around 4000MW.
The advantages of generating renewable power at the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident are that the land is cheap and plentiful, and sunshine hours in the Chernobyl area compare favourably with those in southern Germany, one of the largest solar producers in the world.
In addition, the infrastructure and high-voltage power lines needed to transmit electricity to the national grid remain intact.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development this week indicated it would be prepared to lend money for the renewable energy plan. The bank has already provided more than US$500 million to build a large stainless steel ‘‘sarcophagus’’ over the destroyed reactor, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years.
The move to solar reflects a new reality of plunging renewable energy costs and escalating nuclear power costs.
In Belarus, a 22.3MW solar plant is already under construction in Brahin district, about 30km from Chernobyl. The district was one of the most contaminated by Chernobyl’s fallout, and the land where the plant is being built is not suitable for agriculture.