State girds for mosquito-borne outbreaks

With mosquito-­borne diseases such as dengue fever and Zika virus continuing to be a threat to Hawaii, the state is ramping up its vector control capacity in an effort to help prevent an outbreak — or at least meet one with greater force.

In addition, the state Department of Health is nearing completion of a Joint Hawaii Mosquito-borne Disease Outbreak Emergency Operations Plan that aims to better coordinate the state’s response to an outbreak.

“There’s been a lot of progress,” department spokeswoman Janice Okubo said of the state’s readiness for another outbreak.

The plan, ordered by Gov. David Ige following the 2015-16 dengue fever outbreak, which sickened 264 people on Hawaii island, is now the subject of a series of practice scenarios seeking feedback from the various government agencies that would be involved in an outbreak response.

Exercises have been completed in Kauai, Maui and Hawaii counties, and another was scheduled for this week in Honolulu.

“With the nationwide Zika crisis last year, everybody’s on alert and getting prepared,” said Keith Kawaoka, the Health Department’s deputy director for environmental health.

The department, with $1.27 million in support from the 2016 state Legislature, increased Vector Control Branch staffing statewide to 45 positions from 25. This year lawmakers authorized another six positions.

That will bring the number of positions to just under 2009 levels. That year Gov. Linda Lingle, looking for places to cut during the recession, slashed the staff to 17 and moved the remaining employees to another office.

When the dengue fever outbreak struck the Big Island in September 2015, the department was forced to fly vector control employees to Hawaii island.

With staffing closer to 100 percent, the department has assigned 15 employees — inspectors, specialists and an entomologist — to the Big Island, officials said.

This week branch employees are attending a three-day workshop in Kona to evaluate response plans and undergo training on mosquito surveillance and abatement practices.

Officials said the Big Isle program is working to develop strategies to reduce mosquito populations and prevent breeding areas.

The branch, they said, is expected to conduct islandwide mosquito surveillance and mapping to identify species and their prevalence as well as to assess the risk they pose to residents and visitors. Special attention will be paid to Aedes aegypti, which is an especially good carrier of Zika, dengue and chikungunya, Okubo said.

Big Island employees are also expected to participate in ongoing studies to predict mosquito breeding patterns based on rainfall and other environmental and seasonal influences, officials said.

Elsewhere, the department’s Disease Outbreak Control Division has added three staff members dedicated to mosquito-borne diseases. Among other things, the staffers will provide streamlined coordination and collaboration during a disease outbreak, officials said.

And the state Laboratories Division in Pearl City — one of only a handful of public health laboratories in the country with the capacity to test for dengue, Zika and chikungunya viruses — is closing in on improving its testing process and reducing the time to get final results in some difficult cases.

So far this year the state has seen three imported cases of dengue fever and one imported case of the Zika virus, according to the department.