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In the fight against Zika and future disease outbreaks, aerial drones might help by delivering medical supplies to remote areas and ferrying back lab samples for testing, or by dropping squadrons of sterile mosquitoes over an affected area to halt spread of a virus. Those are among the ideas selected by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to receive $3.3 million in funding for testing and development. Other possible innovations, many of them currently being tested overseas, include mining data to forecast future outbreaks and harnessing the collective power of mobile phones to improve disease surveillance, according to Wednesday’s announcement. (Chang, 10/12)

In the nine months since the first travel-related Zika case was confirmed in Florida, more than 1,000 others have tested positive for the virus. The majority have been infected overseas, but the number of homegrown cases has been going up too, reaching 150 since June 30, when the first local case was confirmed in Miami's Wynwood neighborhood. On Wednesday, the state health department reported five new travel-related Zika cases, and six new local cases, which have been linked to Miami-Dade County. (Miller, 10/12)