With the holiday and travel season upon us, Arizonans are encouraged to continue to rebel against arboviruses like chikungunya, dengue, and Zika. Whether you are traveling to a galaxy far, far away or to lands much closer to home, we encourage you to “Fight the Bite” and support resistance efforts. If you have a bad [...]
The Arizona Department of Health Services, Maricopa County Department of Public Health, and the University of Arizona will kick-off the second Great Arizona Mosquito Hunt this week. The Great Arizona Mosquito Hunt began as a collaborative project in 2015 to teach high school students about mosquito biology and emerging mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue, chikungunya, [...]
Last week we hosted a two-day workshop on improving surveillance capacity for diseases spread by mosquitoes with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the International Society of Disease Surveillance (ISDS). ISDS's mission of bringing ideas to actions with measurable impact on public health practice, helped our Office of Infectious Disease Services to develop new ways to better inform our response [...]
As expected, the first case of Zika has finally been confirmed in Arizona. Yesterday, our Arizona State Public Health Laboratory identified Zika virus in a specimen sent to us for testing. The case, an older adult woman in Maricopa County, was infected with the disease while traveling in a country with known Zika virus transmission. [...]
If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve noticed a lot of attention on Zika virus, an emerging mosquito-borne disease that’s spreading across the Americas. As of today, no cases of Zika have been found in Arizona, but several other U.S. states are reporting cases of Zika virus in travelers returning from countries where the [...]
This is the time of year when we start closing out all of our infectious disease data from the previous year. That means our epidemiology and data entry staff will be hard at work to identify potential duplicate cases, make sure reported disease cases are classified correctly and similarly between the state and local health [...]
Dengue and chikungunya are two mosquito-borne viruses that Arizonans can contract when traveling outside the country. If a mosquito in Arizona bites an infected person during their illness, it would be possible for the virus to start spreading in the state. To prevent this from happening, it is important for public health to identify suspected [...]
Our vector-borne disease team is partnering with the University of Arizona, Maricopa County Department of Public Health, and other local health departments in a project with high schools around the state to learn more about the Aedes aegypti mosquito. This mosquito was introduced to Arizona in the past 20 years and can transmit dengue and [...]
During the World Cup, I wrote about dengue, since it’s endemic in Brazil. Every year, we get a handful of dengue cases reported in Arizona (4 last year) that are associated with travel to a country with dengue circulation, but for the first time, dengue is at our border. Over the last few weeks, locally transmitted [...]
GOOOOAAAAAL!!! With the World Cup just around the corner, soccer fans are dusting off their jerseys and getting ready to cheer on their favorite team. For super-fans lucky enough to travel to Brazil to see the matches first hand, fans of opposing teams aren’t the biggest threat… a mosquito-borne disease is. Dengue, spread by the [...]
