02-12-2016, 08:31 PM
quote:Not really. Hawaii just doesn't have lots of people living together in areas with lots of mosquitos, where there's an opportunity for the same mosquito to bite an infected person and then at least one uninfected person, which is what's required to transmit disease. Our cities have relatively few mosquitos and everyone has screens on their windows, and the rural areas with mosquitos have the people spread out relatively far apart.
Originally posted by gypsy69
The zika and dengue combo could be just devastating to our island residents current living ways of life?
Compare that to Brazil, with huge urban tenements that breed mosquitos in little spots of water and people have open windows; or Tahiti, where much of the population outside Papaete lives in small but relatively closely-settled villages in the narrow coastal strip. When chikungunya (which I worry about much more than Zika) got to Tahiti, almost the entire population of ~150,000 was infected with it after a year. The dengue outbreak here (vectored by the same mosquitos) has been going on for six months and there have only been 250 cases.
It's also worth mentioning that we have very little of the Aedes aegypti mosquito here. It's a much more effective vector because it prefers to live around people and in houses, whereas the one that's dominant here, Aedes albopictus, generally prefers forest and also bites birds and pigs.