Battling outbreak, Hawaii faces small staff, pesticide fears

HONOLULU (AP) — On a farm in the heart of Hawaii's ongoing dengue outbreak, coffee grows wild among the ferns, and vanilla vines climb guava trees. It's hard to know where nature ends and the farm begins, and that's the way organic farmers there like it.

But state efforts to combat the outbreak – and prevent the related Zika virus from making inroads on the island – could put these farmers out of business. Posting "no spray" signs on their properties, they're pushing back on the use of pesticides to kill the mosquitoes that transmit both infections.

Global health officials have identified mosquito eradication as the key to curtailing the Zika outbreak that has taken hold in Latin America and been linked to birth defects in Brazil, as well as preventing it from taking hold in other areas where the Aedes aegypti mosquito is prevalent, including the southern U.S.

"Any place a dengue outbreak can occur, a Zika outbreak could occur," Lyle Peterson, director of CDC's division of vector-borne diseases, said in an interview with The Associated Press. "Given the fact that many affected travelers could be coming to Hawaii as outbreaks occur around the Pacific, there is always the possibility of infecting local mosquitoes."