The Florida Department of Health has issued a statewide mosquito-borne illness advisory after four locally contracted cases of malaria were reported along the Gulf Coast south of Tampa.
The four residents in Sarasota County received treatment and have recovered, according to the state’s Department of Health advisory. Malaria, caused by a parasite that spreads through bites from Anopheles mosquitoes, causes fever, chills, sweats, nausea and vomiting, and headaches. It is not spread person to person.
It’s the threat of the mosquito-borne illness that concerns Kathleen Gibson-Dee, who lives on Terra Ceia Island, which is about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of Sarasota County.
Even though no malaria cases have been reported in Manatee County, where Terra Ceia is located, Gibson-Dee said that she’s now routinely using bug repellent while working in her garden.
“I don’t go out without it,” she told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “And we don’t go out in the evening because you can see clouds and clouds of bugs now. They may not all be mosquitoes, but there’s certainly mosquitos out there.”
Another resident, Tom Lyons, says news of the malaria cases “makes me take mosquito protection a little more seriously.”
The mosquito population thrives in Terra Ceia because “it’s an island surrounded by a lot of shallow water and mangroves, and ideal places for mosquitoes,” Lyons said.
Officials in Manatee County have ramped up efforts to control the mosquito population.
Chris Lesser, director of the Manatee County mosquito control district, said they’re primarily using helicopters to combat the mosquito population because they cover between 15,000 and 20,000 acres (6070 to 8082 hectares) in one night. A truck can only cover around 1,000 acres (404 hectares) a night, he said.
“We really want to focus on killing the adult mosquito before they have the opportunity to feed on one person that may be infected with malaria and then transmit that disease to a second person,” Lesser said.
He said the time frame for when a mosquito can become infected to when it can transmit the disease to a person is about 14 days.
“So we’re trying to get in there about once every seven to 10 days and really knock down the mosquito population. And that process will continue until the public health alert that we’re currently under is lifted,” Lesser said.
“It’s a curtain,” he continued. “We’re trying to keep the malaria mosquitos from coming into our county through our southern border by using aggressive mosquito control activities.”
Officials in Sarasota County area also using similar tactics to control mosquitos, the county’s health department said in an advisory.
The initial malaria advisory was issued in Sarasota County after the first case was reported in late May. That was followed by a second case, and then two more, said Jae Williams, the press secretary for the Florida Department of Health.
“As soon as it crossed over from one to two confirmed cases, it progressed to an alert,” Williams said, comparing it to the system of issuing a hurricane watch versus a hurricane warning — when a storm is imminent.
“Listen, the conditions are favorable,” Williams continued. “It’s not just some rogue one mosquito. People need to be paying attention.”
Williams said health officials are being proactive.
“We know we are going into the Fourth of July holiday. We know the summer’s only getting hotter and wetter over the next couple of months,” Williams said. “So we just wanted to give Floridians a big kind of heads up, put the whole state on notice.”
About 2,000 U.S. cases of malaria are diagnosed each year — the vast majority in travelers coming from countries where malaria commonly spreads.
Since 1992, there have been 11 outbreaks involving malaria from mosquitoes in the U.S. The last one occurred in 2003 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where eight cases were reported.
More than $200 billion may have been stolen from two large COVID-19 relief initiatives, according to new estimates from a federal watchdog investigating federally funded programs that helped small businesses survive the worst public health crisis in more than a hundred years.
The numbers issued Tuesday by the U.S. Small Business Administration inspector general are much greater than the office’s previous projections and underscore how vulnerable the Paycheck Protection and COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs were to fraudsters, particularly during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.
The inspector general’s report said “at least 17 percent of all COVID-EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.” The fraud estimate for the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program is more than $136 billion, which represents 33 percent of the total money spent on that program, according to the report. The Paycheck Protection fraud estimate is $64 billion, the inspector general said.
In comments attached to the report, a senior SBA official disputed the new numbers. Bailey DeVries, SBA’s acting associate administrator for capital access, said the inspector general’s “approach contains serious flaws that significantly overestimate fraud and unintentionally mislead the public to believe that the work we did together had no significant impact in protecting against fraud.”
The SBA inspector general had previously estimated fraud in the COVID-19 disaster loan program at $86 billion and the Paycheck Protection program at $20 billion.
The Associated Press reported June 13 that scammers and swindlers potentially swiped about $280 billion in COVID-19 emergency aid; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent. The bulk of the potential losses are from the two SBA programs and another to provide unemployment benefits to workers suddenly unemployed by the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic. The three initiatives were launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden. Combined, the loss estimated by AP represents 10% of the $4.2 trillion the U.S. government has so far disbursed in COVID relief aid.
The SBA inspector general, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, said in a statement Tuesday that the report “utilizes investigative casework, prior (inspector general) reporting, and cutting-edge data analysis to identify multiple fraud schemes used to potentially steal over $200 billion from American taxpayers and exploit programs meant to help those in need.”
Ware, in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this month, said that these latest fraud figures won’t be the last ones issued by his office.
“We will continue to assess fraud until we’re finished with the investigations on these things,” Ware said. That could be a long while. Ware’s office has a backlog of more than 90,000 actionable leads into pandemic relief fraud, which amounts to nearly a century’s worth of work.
SBA previously told The Associated Press the federal government has not developed an accepted system for assessing fraud in federal programs. Previous analyses, the agency said, have pointed to “potential fraud” or “fraud indicators” in a manner that conveys those numbers as a true fraud estimate when they are not. For the COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, the agency said it’s “working estimate” found $28 billion in likely fraud.
Han Nguyen, a spokesman for the SBA, said in a statement Tuesday that it is “vital to clarify that 86% of the likely fraud in the PPP and COVID-EIDL programs occurred in the first nine months of those programs when, as the (inspector general) has often noted, the rush to get funds out led to unwise decisions to pull down anti-fraud guardrails.”
Fraud in pandemic unemployment assistance programs stands at $76 billion, according to congressional testimony from Labor Department Inspector General Larry Turner. That’s a conservative estimate. Another $115 billion mistakenly went to people who should not have received the benefits, according to his testimony.
The Biden administration put in place stricter rules to stem pandemic fraud, including use of the “Do Not Pay” database. Biden also recently proposed a $1.6 billion plan to boost law enforcement efforts to go after pandemic relief fraudsters.
“I think the bottom line is regardless of what the (total fraud) number is, it emanates overwhelmingly from three programs that were designed and originated in 2020 with too many large holes that opened the door to criminal fraud,” Gene Sperling, the White House American Rescue Plan coordinator, said in an early June interview.
Bob Westbrooks, a former executive director of the federal Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, said in an interview the $200 billion number is “unacceptable, unprecedented and unfathomable.” Westbrooks published a book last week, “Left Holding the Bag: A Watchdog’s Account of How Washington Fumbled its COVID Test.”
“The swift distribution of funds and program integrity are not mutually exclusive,” Westbrooks said Tuesday. “The government can walk and chew gum at the same time. They should have put basic fraud controls in place to verify people’s identity and to make sure targeted relief was getting into the right hands.”
Britain was ill-prepared for a pandemic partly because government resources had been diverted away from pandemic planning to brace for a possibly chaotic exit from the European Union without a deal, the U.K.’s former health secretary told an inquiry Tuesday.
Matt Hancock also said officials had to scramble to source protective equipment, set up mass testing and contact tracing systems “from scratch” once the coronavirus pandemic broke out because the U.K. planning attitude was entirely “geared towards how to clear up after a disaster, not prevent it.”
“The doctrine of the U.K. was to plan for the consequences of a disaster — can we buy enough body bags? Where are we going to bury the dead?” Hancock said.
“Large-scale testing did not exist and large-scale contact tracing did not exist because it was assumed that as soon as there was community transmission, it wouldn’t be possible to stop the spread, and therefore, what’s the point in contact tracing?” he added. “That was completely wrong.”
Hancock acknowledged that a decade-old government document on preparing for a pandemic was never updated, and that an official pandemic preparedness board paused its work in 2018 to 2019 because resources were moved away to focus instead on the threat of a “disorganized Brexit.”
Britain’s government was preoccupied in 2019 with the possibility of crashing out of the EU without a deal on the departure terms in place. A bitterly divided Parliament rejected then-Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan three times.
The U.K. eventually left the trade bloc in 2020.
As health secretary, Hancock became one of the best-known politicians in Britain as he led efforts to halt the spread of the coronavirus before he was forced to quit in June 2021, when he was caught breaking social distancing rules with an aide. Pictures of him kissing the aide in government offices were splashed across front pages at the time.
Hancock has previously faced criticism about the U.K.’s COVID testing measures and how authorities managed the spread of the pandemic in care homes for the elderly. The U.K. had one of the highest COVID-19 death tolls in Europe, with the virus recorded as a cause of death for almost 227,000 people.
Hancock said an emotional sorry Tuesday to all those who died and were affected.
“I’m profoundly sorry for each death that has occurred. I also understand why, for some, it will be hard to take that apology from me,” he said.
Earlier, members of the group COVID Families for Justice held up pictures of relatives who died in the pandemic as Hancock arrived at the inquiry in London.
The wide-ranging inquiry, led by a retired judge, aims to investigate the U.K.’s preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic, how the government responded and what lessons can be learned for the future. Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led the U.K. during the pandemic, agreed in late 2021 to hold the probe after heavy pressure from bereaved families.
The United States has seen five cases of malaria spread by mosquitos in the last two months — the first time there’s been local spread in in 20 years.
There were four cases detected in Florida and one in Texas, according to a health alert issued Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Malaria is caused by a parasite that spreads through mosquito bites. Infected people can suffer fever, chills and flu-like illness. If it goes untreated, infected people can develop severe complications and die. The largest death toll in recent years has been seen in children in sub-Saharan Africa.
Health officials are warning doctors, especially those in southern states where the weather is more friendly to the tropical mosquito that spreads malaria, to be aware of the possibility of infection. They also should think about how to access IV artesunate, which is the first-line treatment for severe malaria in the United States, the CDC said.
The agency also said that the people who were diagnosed received treatment and “are improving.”
According to the Florida Department of health, the four confirmed cases were in Sarasota County.
About 2,000 U.S. cases of malaria are diagnosed each year — the vast majority in travelers coming from countries where malaria commonly spreads. Since 1992, there’ve been 11 outbreaks involving malaria from mosquitoes in the U.S.; the last one occurred in 2003 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where eight cases were reported
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U.S. officials released an intelligence report Friday that rejected some points raised by those who argue COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab, instead reiterating that American spy agencies remain divided over how the pandemic began.
The report was issued at the behest of Congress, which in March passed a bill giving U.S. intelligence 90 days to declassify intelligence related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Intelligence officials under President Joe Biden have been pushed by lawmakers to release more material about the origins of COVID-19. But they have repeatedly argued China’s official obstruction of independent reviews has made it perhaps impossible to determine how the pandemic began.
The newest report angered some Republicans who have argued the administration is wrongly withholding classified information and researchers who accuse the U.S. of not being forthcoming.
John Ratcliffe, who served as U.S. director of national intelligence under former President Donald Trump, accused the Biden administration of “continued obfuscation.”
“The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.
There was newfound interest from researchers following the revelation earlier this year that the Department of Energy’s intelligence arm had issued a report arguing for a lab-related incident.
But Friday’s report said the intelligence community has not gone further. Four agencies still believe the virus was transferred from animals to humans, and two agencies — the Energy Department and the FBI — believe the virus leaked from a lab. The CIA and another agency have not made an assessment.
Located in the city where the pandemic is believed to have began, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has faced intense scrutiny for its previous research into bat coronaviruses and its reported security lapses.
The lab genetically engineered viruses as part of its research, the report said, including efforts to combine different viruses.
But the report says U.S. intelligence “has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.”
And reports of several lab researchers falling ill with respiratory symptoms in fall 2019 are also inconclusive, the report argues.
U.S. intelligence, the report said, “continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.”
Responding to the report, the Republican chairs of the House Intelligence Committee and a select subcommittee on the pandemic jointly said they had gathered information in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. Reps. Mike Turner and Brad Wenstrup, both of Ohio, credited the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence for taking a “promising step toward transparency.”
“While we appreciate the report from ODNI, the corroboration of all available evidence along with further investigation into the origins of COVID-19 must continue,” Turner and Wenstrup said.
But Alina Chan, a molecular biologist who has long argued the virus may have originated in the Wuhan lab, noted the public version of the report did not include the names of researchers who fell sick or other details mandated by Congress.
The bill requiring the review allowed intelligence officials to redact information publicly to protect agency sources and methods.
“It’s getting very difficult to believe that the government is not trying to hide what they know about #OriginOfCovid when you see a report like this that contains none of the requested info,” Chan tweeted.
A federal judge on Wednesday struck down Florida rules championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis restricting Medicaid coverage for gender dysphoria treatments for potentially thousands of transgender people.
“Gender identity is real” and the state has admitted it, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle wrote in a 54-page ruling.
He said a Florida health code rule and a new state law violated federal laws on Medicaid, equal protection and the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition of sex discrimination.
They are “invalid to the extent they categorically ban Medicaid payment for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria,” Hinkle wrote.
The judge said Florida had chosen to block payment for some treatments “for political reasons” using a biased and unscientific process and that “pushing individuals away from their transgender identity is not a legitimate state interest.”
An email seeking comment from the DeSantis’ office wasn’t immediately returned.
Hinkle’s harsh language echoed that in his ruling two weeks ago over a law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers. Hinkle, who was appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton, issued a preliminary injunction so that three children could continue receiving treatment.
The DeSantis administration and the Republican-controlled Legislature had banned gender-affirming treatments for children and a law that DeSantis signed in May made it difficult — even impossible —for many transgender adults to get treatment.
The latest ruling involved a lawsuit filed last year on behalf of two adults and two minors, but advocacy groups estimate that some 9,000 transgender people in Florida use Medicaid to fund their treatments.
Hinkle also addressed the issue of whether gender-affirming treatments were medically necessary and noted that transgender people have higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicide than the general population.
Transgender medical care for minors is increasingly under attack — Florida is among 19 states that have enacted laws restricting or banning treatment. But it has been available in the United States for more than a decade and is endorsed by major medical associations.
