She almost never left Long Island, so the test results and diagnosis simply did not make sense. Not to her, not to her doctors, not to the local health authorities. She was sick with a mosquito-borne tropical disease. A disease that wasn’t supposed to be in New York.
And yet she had the telltale symptoms of chikungunya: fever and joint pain so severe that it made walking difficult and driving impossible. It hurt too much to grip the steering wheel. Her shoulder felt as if it was being wrenched apart. In the middle of the night, she would wake up, drenched in sweat, a hot pain in her toes and a weird sensation: It felt as if someone was pulling on them.
Chikungunya has surged globally in 2025 — with outbreaks in places including Brazil, islands in the Indian Ocean and China, with more than 445,000 cases worldwide. But the United States has long seemed immune. Only a smattering of cases resulting from local transmission had been reported, in Florida and Texas, and those happened more than a decade ago. The virus had never been known to circulate in New York.
And yet, in lab test after lab test during the past five weeks, the 60-year-old woman tested positive for chikungunya. The health authorities questioned her skeptically about her travel history, insinuating that she was concealing an overseas vacation to the buggy tropics, she said.
But she had not traveled to any of the hot spots recently. The last trip she took, she said, was to Rhode Island in March. And she had been to Maine in 2017. In fact, she said in an interview, she rarely left Long Island. Her husband had commuted into Manhattan for 41 years, by car, amid some of the most reliably clogged traffic in the country. And now retired, he was done traveling. They liked to stay put, on Long Island. They live in the Town of Hempstead in central Nassau County, some 20 miles east of Manhattan.
She fills her days with grandchildren, gardening and taking photographs of birds, nature and sunrises.
“Somehow, it found me here,” she said. The patient spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want to be associated online with an unusual virus.
On Tuesday, the state health authorities confirmed what the woman had known for a month. She had chikungunya and appeared to have caught it on Long Island, the first such case of local transmission ever recorded in New York. That meant that the virus was circulating in mosquitoes, or at least one mosquito, locally.
The arrival of chikungunya only adds to the health threats posed by arthropods on Long Island. Tick bites sicken thousands of people there each year. Suffolk County, which covers Long Island’s eastern two-thirds, has more Lyme disease cases than any other county in the nation some years. Alpha-gal syndrome, a meat allergy linked to tick bites, is also a growing health problem on Long Island.
Living on Long Island, the patient had long taken care to avoid tick bites. On walks, she never strayed from the path. Now, the first patient to catch chikungunya in New York has begun taking new precautions against mosquito bites.
An avid gardener, she had never allowed pesticides or any mosquito repellents to be applied to her yard, unlike many Long Island residents. But since her diagnosis, she and her husband have bought a natural mosquito repellent and sprayed it around the perimeter of the garden, hoping to keep mosquitoes at bay.
Chikungunya, which was first identified in Tanzania in the 1950s, means “that which bends up” — a reference to the contorted postures of those suffering extreme joint pain.
The spread of the virus to new regions is driven partly by climate change, which creates new habitats for the mosquitoes that transmit the virus. But it also reflects the adaptability and extraordinary spread of the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, which is one of two species that drive much of the disease’s spread. It shows signs of adapting to colder climates, such as laying eggs that can outlast long, cold winters.
The Asian tiger mosquito gained a foothold in the continental United States just 40 years ago, probably arriving in water in used tires that had been shipped from Japan. In the decades since, it has established itself across much of the United States, including the lower stretches of New York.
But the question remained: How did the virus end up here? One possibility is that a mosquito infected with chikungunya traveled in a plane or in a passenger’s luggage from a region where the disease is endemic back to New York, health experts said.
A spokeswoman for the state health department, Danielle De Souza, offered a second possibility: A New York resident who was infected abroad with chikungunya might have returned home and was then bitten by “vector-capable mosquitoes,” such as the Asian tiger mosquito. Those mosquitoes, in turn, became infected, and one went on to bite this woman.
This year, health authorities are aware of at least a half-dozen people in New York who tested positive for chikungunya after being infected abroad.
The First Sign
On Aug. 21, a Thursday, she woke up, and her shoulder felt as if it were on fire — “like nothing I’d ever experienced before in my life,” she said. She felt chills and feverish. By that night, she was vomiting.
The pain moved from body part to body part. The balls of her feet ached so she shuffled around on her heels. The pain worked its way up her ankles and then to her knees.
She had no idea what ailed her but remembered wondering if it might be West Nile virus, another mosquito-borne disease that infected 100 people across New York last year.
“I thought West Nile because nothing else was clicking,” she said.
She went to an emergency room on Aug. 23 but learned little about what had beset her. She recalled asking about West Nile but said she wasn’t tested for any mosquito-borne diseases then.
The following week, she went to another hospital, Mercy, in Rockville Centre, staying for three days. Tests showed that her white blood cell count was severely low. A doctor warned that she should prepare for the possibility of a diagnosis of lymphoma, a form of cancer.
A subsequent doctor ruled that out.
Doctors at Mercy also suspected she might be having issues with her gallbladder, which can lead to pain in the right shoulder, just as she had. But that was eventually ruled out.
In the days after she left the hospital, she went to see a rheumatologist, where she caught a break. The rheumatologist ordered a test for West Nile and chikungunya, too, she said.
The blood draw for these tests occurred on Sept. 5, about two weeks after she fell ill. During that time, she had stopped driving, unable to grip the steering wheel. Everything was swollen, especially her hands, which were puffy all the time. Putting her shoes on was an ordeal.
At night, she was drenched in sweat. Her sleep was cut short by that strange pain, as though someone were pulling her toes.
On Sept. 15, she received her test results. She was stunned at what she saw. She turned to her husband with a question: What exactly is chikungunya? He didn’t know either.
The test detected chikungunya antibodies. That led to further blood tests for the virus itself, not just antibodies. Samples went to a commercial laboratory and the state’s public health lab, the Wadsworth Center, in Albany.
Over the next few weeks, she began getting calls from a Nassau County health department employee who was investigating how she might have been infected. Had she traveled anywhere in recent months or years?
The same health investigator called back later, the woman said in an interview. Apparently skeptical of her previous answer — no overseas travel — the investigator asked the same question again but added, “Now that you’ve had time to think about it,” the woman recounted.
Nassau County officials did not respond to requests for comment.
To the woman, it felt as though everyone doubted that she could have gotten chikungunya on Long Island. She told the investigator she had been to Huntington and Riverhead — towns on Long Island — and suggested they search for chikungunya in those areas, too.
Another doctor told her that the antibody test results were probably a false positive, noting there wasn’t any chikungunya in New York.
More than a month had now passed since she fell ill. Her joint pain was less excruciating, but her hands, fingers, wrists, knees and ankles still ached.
On the couch at home, she read articles about chikungunya and how patients fared. For some, the joint pain eased in a week or so, while others experienced debilitating symptoms for months or longer.
In early October, she began a four-week course of steroids, which lessened the joint pain.
On Tuesday, the state health department announced “the first locally acquired case of chikungunya” in New York. “An investigation suggests that the individual likely contracted the virus following a bite from an infected mosquito.”
The state health commissioner, Dr. James McDonald, said the risk of infection was low. Testing by health authorities of batches of mosquitoes — a practice called “mosquito pool testing” — had not turned up further evidence of mosquitoes carrying chikungunya. In addition, Dr. McDonald noted the seasons were changing. “Given the much colder nighttime temperatures, the current risk in New York is very low.”
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following years of criminal justice and police reporting.
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