The Rishon Lezion municipality is intensively spraying pesticides around the home of a person discovered to be carrying the dangerous Zika virus, Ynet reports.
The Health Ministry warned the municipality in central Israel that the move was necessary to stop the disease spreading to the patient’s neighbors, the report says.
No details were given about the patient. So far there have been about 10 confirmed cases in Israel.
The city is intensively spraying an area of some 4,000 square meters at a cost of tens of thousands of shekels, Ynet says.
A researcher looks at Aedes aegypti mosquitoes kept in a container at a lab of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the Sao Paulo University, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on January 8, 2016. (AFP/NELSON ALMEIDA)
Zika is transmitted by the bite of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which also spreads dengue, yellow fever and the chikungunya virus. It is named for the Ugandan forest, where it was first discovered in 1947, and is common in Asia and Africa. It began to spread more widely in May, when an outbreak was reported in Brazil.
Israel’s Health Ministry warns pregnant women to consider canceling trips to countries being swept by the virus, in light of the evidence of a link between Zika and fetal microcephaly.
The condition causes abnormal smallness of the fetus’s head and incomplete development of the brain.
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