and quickly report any suspected cases to the health department. The real concern is for pregnant women, and we know they may be worried and have questions. Right now, we don’t have local transmission here, so the real risk is with travel. Talk to pregnant women and their partners about travel plans and the need to strictly follow precautions to protect themselves. This is a very direct way to deliver the prevention messages we are trying to convey, and we appreci- ate the role of physicians in helping us do that. I think it’s really important to un-
derstand that we can take very effec- tive steps to really limit the public health impact that Zika would have. I recently sent a letter to local commu- nity leaders outlining what we would like the local folks to do. That particu- lar mosquito species really only feeds on human beings; it tends to live in close proximity to human beings. It only tends to travel maybe 200 meters in its entire lifetime, so [make] efforts to clean up your own backyard quite literally to get rid of breeding grounds. Unfortunately, it can breed in very,
very small bodies of water, like a tea- spoon of water. But the more effec- tively the communities and individu- als around their own homes can elim- inate those breeding grounds, that is extremely effective because the mos- quito’s not flying from miles away; the mosquito’s flying from meters away. Anything you can do to broaden that perimeter so that you deny them that breeding ground in your environment is going to be very effective. The other things that we’re looking
at are other types of vector controls. You’re getting into killing the larvae before they hatch, which is far more effective than trying to kill the adults once they’re all flying around. If you eliminate one breeding ground that way, you’ve eliminated tens of thou- sands, if not hundreds of thousands, of mosquitoes from hatching and flying around in the environment. I think the other thing that’s go-
May 2016 TEXAS MEDICINE 61
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