A virus spread through mosquito bites is hitting China, prompting fears that it could make its way to the United States.
The illness known as the chikungunya virus is transmitted when the insect feeds on an infected person and moves on to bite another individual, Fox News reported on Thursday.
The outlet said the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a level two alert on Wednesday regarding the outbreak in China’s Guangdong Province. The agency’s website urged people to “Practice Enhanced Precautions” if they travel to China.
“Outbreaks have occurred in countries in Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and Indian and Pacific Oceans,” the agency noted.
Per the Fox article, officials in the province reported 7,000 cases. Meanwhile, Breitbart News reported on July 30 that officials in China were struggling to contain the outbreak of the illness that can cause severe muscle and joint pain:
CHIKV outbreaks usually fade when the infected population develops natural immunity, which tends to happen faster in small communities. This has proven to be a problem with the new outbreak in southern China, which spread into the densely populated city of Foshan, a metropolis with about 9.5 million inhabitants.
The people of Guangdong province grew alarmed when the number of reported CHIKV cases began approaching 5,000. Municipal officials in Foshan launched a major health campaign on Monday that requires all government agencies, private companies, and individual citizens to help eliminate mosquito breeding grounds.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry later insisted the outbreak was “under control” and the Communist Party was keeping the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) updated, Breitbart News reported on August 1.
However, the article noted, “The government of China lost a significant amount of trust from the international community as a result of its handling of the Wuhan novel coronavirus outbreak in late 2019, which escalated into a pandemic that has killed over 7 million people since escaping the borders of the country in 2020.”
When it comes to the virus being a danger to large groups of people in the United States, Dr. Paul Sax, who is the clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said, “To really sustain an outbreak of chikungunya in the United States, you need to have a lot more people with chikungunya. And we only occasionally have people with that,” per the Fox report.
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