Why Mosquitoes Love Miami's Wynwood Neighborhood

MIAMI—Over the last few months, Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood came to be known for something other than its cute cafés and swanky art galleries: Zika. In July, the very first locally transmitted U.S. case of the virus was reported in the neighborhood. Soon after, the number of such cases in Miami-Dade County multiplied. By August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel advisory.

Local authorities scrambled to get things under control. Solutions considered to cut down the population of Aedes aegypti, the type of mosquito that spreads Zika, ranged from bats to genetic modification to newfangled mosquito traps. Eventually, the city settled on aerial and ground-sprays of mosquito-killing chemicals. It worked; for now, the number of locally transmitted cases of Zika in Florida has been capped at 137.