The mosquito-borne virus has crossed the Taiwan Strait from southern China, where confirmed cases of chikungunya top 8,000.
Taiwan has reported its first confirmed case of chikungunya fever, imported from China, where a historic outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus is under way.
Chikungunya has swept through southern China in recent weeks, primarily in the manufacturing hub of Foshan on the Pearl River Delta, with cases rising to more than 8,000. The outbreak is the largest on record, according to Roger Hewson, virus surveillance lead at the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Friday that the chikungunya virus was detected in a Taiwanese woman who had travelled to Foshan and returned to Taiwan on July 30.
It was the first case of its kind detected so far in 2025, though more than a dozen cases have been previously detected and originated in Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
The CDC has raised its travel advisory for China’s Guangdong province, the epicentre of the outbreak, to level 2 out of 3, urging travellers to use “enhanced precautions”.
The virus can lead to high fever, rash, headache, nausea and fatigue lasting up to seven days, and muscle and joint pain that can last for several weeks.
“The outbreak in Foshan and surrounding areas of Guangdong province has unfolded rapidly and at a scale unprecedented for China,” Hewson said in a statement.
The surge is due to limited immunity in China and “environmental suitability” for the virus-carrying Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, which breed in stagnant water, he said.
Chinese health authorities have responded with containment strategies ranging from household-level inspections and enforced bed nets, to drone-based fogging and even quarantines, reminiscent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hewson said.
The Associated Press news agency reported that residents of Foshan can be fined as much as up to 10,000 RMB ($1,400) for keeping water in outdoor containers – a popular breeding ground for mosquitoes.
The outbreak follows more than a month of typhoons and heavier-than-usual monsoon rains in China.
Last week, Hong Kong – located some 180km (110 miles) from Foshan – was hit by its worst August rainstorm since records began in 1884.
Chinese state media said despite the historic number of chikungunya cases, the outbreak appears to have finally peaked.
Foshan reported 2,892 local infections from July 27 to August 2, but no severe or fatal cases, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.
“The recent surge has been initially contained, with a downward trend in newly reported cases across the province,” Kang Min, director of the infectious disease control institute at the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, told Xinhua.