Cuban health authorities warned the population on Thursday about high rates of infestation of mosquitoes that transmit dengue, Zika and chikunguya and called for measures to control them.
“In 2021, the highest number of (mosquito) outbreaks were reported in the last 15 years,” especially in the most populated provinces such as Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Holguín, Camagüey, Matanzas and Villa Clara, the Ministry of Public Health said in a statement.
The agency noted that the American continent recorded “high rates of infestation of Aedes Aegypti and Aedes Albopictus”, and as a result, transmission of dengue and other viruses such as chikungunya and Zika increased.
During 2021, nine Cuban provinces were affected by dengue, but “as of September, cases were reduced by 29.3%,” amid a complex epidemiological situation, due to the covid-19 pandemic, he said.
The country has been free of Zika since 2019 and chikungunya since 2017.
For more than 15 years, the health authorities have been deploying a campaign to control the population of Aedes mosquitoes, limited in the last two years by isolation measures due to the covid-19 pandemic, already controlled on the Caribbean island.
The authorities assured that the greatest number of outbreaks are detected in water tanks, especially low tanks “found in a large number of homes” and explained measures in this regard.
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