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It's a pleasure to be able to present this work today.
My name is Cinnamon Bloss.
I am an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego.
The title of my talk is Public Response to
a Proposed Field Trial of Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes in the United States.
This is a case study analysis that I'll be speaking about today.
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So, on August 11th,
2009 in Rochester, New York,
a 34-year-old female showed up at her primary care physician with a headache,
fever and was ended up being treated for a urinary tract infection.
Two days later, she still didn't feel right.
She came back to her physician with a worsening headache.
She had lightheadedness, retro orbital eye pain which is sort of a neurological red flag.
She ended up being referred to the emergency room
and at that time had a negative CAT scan and a lumbar puncture.
Over the course of her short stay in the emergency room,
her lightheadedness resolved and she was sent home after about a seven-hour stay there.
1:05
On August 17th, she came back again to her position for a third visit saying,
"I just don't feel right."
At that point, her physician learned that she
had just returned from a one-week trip to Key West,
Florida where she had received multiple mosquito bites.
At that point, an infectious disease specialist was brought in and
a serum test that they did at that time was sent to
the CDC and found to be positive for dengue fever.
1:35
So she was considered patient zero for
a dengue outbreak that occurred in Florida beginning at that time.
On August 31st, the second patient emerged,
a local Florida resident who is positive for dengue.
At that point, the Florida Department of Public Health did what's
called a serosurvey and randomly tested households in Florida.
Of about 240 people that were tested,
13 or about five percent had evidence of recent dengue infection.
In a number of months later,
by December of 2010,
there were a total of 88 confirmed cases of dengue associated with this outbreak.
This was the first instance of
dengue cases acquired in the continental United States outside of
the Texas-Mexico border since 1945 and
the first locally acquired cases in Florida since 1934.
