Zika Loves Miami Beach

Haphazard urbanization in some of the world’s fastest-growing cities set the stage for Zika’s spread. Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that bears the virus, thrives among humans, and it has found particularly hospitable breeding grounds in the exposed trash, sunken streets, and ad hoc water storage systems of Latin American slums. Inaccessible roads in those same places have posed a problem to insecticide-sprayers attempting to cover every vulnerable corner.

Since the disease emerged in Brazil in May 2015, 45 countries have confirmed examples of local, mosquito-borne Zika transmission, mostly in South America and the Caribbean. In many of these countries, the number of cases have started to trend downwards over the past month. But in the United States, the area of transmission is expanding. In Florida, thirty-five locally acquired cases have been counted there by the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions so far, with two areas in Miami-Dade County identified by the CDC as transmission hot spots. (Although nearly 2,000 of cases of infection resulting from travel and as a handful from sexual intercourse have been reported around the U.S., no other state has documented local transmission yet.) And now another form of urban development is challenging efforts to combat Zika: luxury high-rises.