Asian tiger mosquitoes spotted in Paris

PARIS – Asian tiger mosquitoes, known to carry deadly diseases including dengue fever and chikungunya, were spotted in Paris for the second year running this summer, a local French health agency said. The striped insects were detected by a visitor to the Parc Floral botanical garden in the east of the French capital. Tests by the health agency and city authorities confirmed they were Asian tiger mosquitoes. The park was closed on Wednesday night for an anti-mosquito operation, the city of Paris said in a statement. Authorities said the presence of the mosquitoes in the park was recent and confined to ponds away from homes, and that no other green space in the city had been affected. The Asian tiger mosquito, which can bite dozens of times a minute and originates from Asia, was spotted for the first time in the Paris region last year, 10 years after the first specimen was signaled in France, in the southeast of the country. Diseases transmitted by insects such as mosquitoes are on the rise and have spread across new parts of Europe, including Greece, Italy and France, over the past decade. However no indigenous case of dengue fever and chikungunya has been signaled in the Paris region to date, the health agency said. Separately on Thursday, the prefecture of the Gard region in the south of the country said two indigenous cases of dengue fever contracted through Asian tiger mosquito bites had been reported. "For the moment it's an outbreak that is isolated geographically. Two people living in the same house. They were cured and are in good health now," the authority said in a statement. Six cases of dengue fever have been reported in the neighboring Provence region since 2010. –Reuters