Move over Murder Hornets, There May Be a New Deadly Bug Coming to Town
Throughout this COVID-19 pandemic, it has certainly seemed at times like things are two steps forward and one step back.
After anxiously waiting months for a vaccine to arrive, parts of the world have been hit with a new strain of coronavirus which is still being examined to see what impact it might have moving forward.
And while we've been dealing with the deadly effects of this pandemic, we keep hearing rumors about the existence of so-called 'murder hornets' which, thank goodness haven't descended in large numbers upon us - yet.
But now there may be another potential disease-spreading threat coming our way.
The BBC is reporting about the discovery of a rare breed of mosquito not too far from the United States.
It's known as the Aedes vittatus, a type of mosquito that dates back as far as the 1860s, but up until recently hasn't been seen outside of Africa or the Far East.
All of that changed in the Summer of 2019 when some of the species showed up in a trap at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
That's troubling for health experts who say the Aedes vittatus is capable of carrying nearly all of the most dangerous mosquito-borne diseases and transmitting them to humans. Those diseases kill more than a million people across the globe each year.
The general belief is that the mosquitos showed up in Cuba as eggs on a shipping container or airplane, and have since been spotted in the Dominican Republic, and quite possibly in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico.
Officials say with that type of spread, it's only a matter of time before the Aedes vittatus finds its way to the United States.
If it hasn't already.