Local health officials are still investigating how a Pierce County woman who hadn’t traveled recently might have contracted malaria — but however it happened, the situation involved an “unusual sequence of events.”

The case is rare for a few reasons, said Dr. James Miller, health officer of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, which announced the news Wednesday. It’s Washington state’s first locally acquired case, meaning the woman was most likely bitten here by a malaria-infected mosquito, which would have gotten malaria after biting someone else with the disease, who had traveled recently and perhaps contracted malaria abroad.

If that were the case, it would be a “very unusual sequence of events” Miller said, “which is why we’re doing this more extensive investigation for this c

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