Florida: Mosquito-Borne Virus Infects Human for First Time

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For the very first time, a person has been officially infected NPR reports. A coastal virus that can cause a rash and mild fever, is present in  Florida.

Scientists say it took 18 months to figure out that a Florida teen who got sick during the Zika outbreak of 2016 actually had the Keystone virus, which is carried by mosquitos.

“We couldn’t identify what was going on,” J. Glenn Morris, head of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, tells WUSF. “We screened this with all the standard approaches and it literally took a year and a half of sort of dogged laboratory work to figure out what this virus was.” There wasn’t even a test to detect Keystone virus in humans.

The 16-year-old boy had a fever and a bad rash, but not the encephalitis (or brain inflammation) that a group of viruses including Keystone can cause in animals.

First seen in America in 1964, Keystone is known to infect “animal populations along coastal regions stretching from Texas to the Chesapeake Bay,” per a University of Florida Health statement.

Scientists have long suspected there are human cases, but the new study in Clinical Infectious Diseases confirms it.

“The infection may actually be fairly common in North Florida,” says lead study author John Lednicky. “It’s one of these instances where if you don’t know to look for something, you don’t find it.”

Edited Via Newser.

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Glenn R. Geist
5 years ago

Impossible to avoid here, but they do seem to prefer yankees. The longer I’ve been here, the fewer I get.

jess
5 years ago

I hate getting mosquito bites because it means weeks of antibiotics and Benadryl for me I get so sick.

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