ORANGE, Fla. — Orange County has been placed under a mosquito-borne illness alert, the first upgrade of its kind since 2011, after health officials confirmed a third locally acquired case of dengue.
The Florida Department of Health elevated the county’s status from an advisory to an alert on Thursday, after two additional cases of dengue were confirmed in the same household in Apopka. That case joins an earlier locally acquired case reported in Pine Hills.
Steve Harrison, manager of Orange County Mosquito Control, explained the shift.
“The advisory was put out initially because we had one case of locally acquired dengue in one area of Pine Hills. Unfortunately, now we have another area of the county where we’ve had two individuals contract dengue, which now brings it to an alert status, which is a higher concern,” Harrison said.
The Apopka case was confirmed the same day the alert was issued.
“That individual was tested, and they confirmed that he did have locally acquired dengue. There was no associated travel,” Harrison said.
Harrison said this is the first local dengue transmission in Orange County since 2024.
The news comes as the county unveils new laboratory equipment designed to speed up mosquito testing. The technology, which uses PCR detection, allows staff to test mosquitoes for viruses in a single day, rather than shipping samples to an outside lab, a process that previously took up to a week or longer.
“We can collect mosquitoes, we process them, we separate them, we test them, and within one day we can know if those mosquitoes had active virus within them,” Harrison said.
Harrison said his team is already using the new equipment to sample mosquitoes in the affected areas.
“Luckily, none of those mosquitoes came back positive for virus. But we will continue to go back and look in those areas because we do not want to find any activity inside mosquitoes,” Harrison said.
Dengue is spread by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is most active during the day and typically stays within a few blocks of where it hatched. Mosquito control crews are conducting door-to-door treatments in both Pine Hills and Apopka to eliminate standing water and breeding sites.
Harrison recommends residents take precautions to prevent mosquito bites. He suggests removing any standing water on their property, wearing long sleeves and pants, and using EPA-approved insect repellent.
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