The best way to avoid getting Zika is to avoid mosquito bites.
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The agency in early February revised its guidelines for pregnant women to include a recommendation that even those without symptoms of the Zika virus should be tested after returning from affected areas.
According to the CDC’s website, 82 reports of travel-associated Zika virus have been documented within the continental U.S.so far, but no cases of locally acquired Zika virus reports have been documented.
The CDC restated there is no evidence that women can transmit the virus to their sexual partners and that the most likely way to become infected with the Zika virus is from infected mosquitoes.
After that, health officials advised men who traveled to affected areas to abstain from sex or use condoms during sex.
How long would these precautions be warranted? Zika virus tends to persist for about a week in blood, but it’s unclear how long it persists in other bodily fluids like semen or saliva.
In the meantime, the quest to answer important questions about Zika continues.
“We were surprised, given the numbers actively being investigated”, Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s deputy director, said in an interview. They hope to recruit at least 130 babies with microcephaly and compare them to nearly triple that number of infants without the condition, the AP said.
For now, the teams are venturing through some of the poorest neighborhoods of the capital, where families cohabitants with the Zika-spreading Aedes aegypti mosquito and eke by on just a couple hundred dollars a month.
The link hasn’t been confirmed but the possibility has prompted health officials to take cautionary steps to protect fetuses from the virus. It also probed into the level of concern of participants on the growing outbreak. “The mosquito is the most risky animal on the planet”, said Dr. William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, past president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. The virus itself is relatively harmless to most people, but what’s worrying is the potential that it causes severe birth defects. The illness is usually mild, and about 80 percent of people with the virus don’t have symptoms, the health department said.
She said several studies are planned that will look into this, but until that information is available, it is safer for women to protect themselves during pregnancy.
In a place like Brazil, where there’s active transmission going on, it’s harder to disentangle who got Zika from a mosquito and who got Zika through sex, he says.
Mosquito-borne Zika outbreaks have erupted across most of Latin America and the Caribbean in the past year.
“The average person is really at very low risk of developing Zika infection or getting really sick from it”, Schuchat said. The U.S. cases may help scientists figure out more about how the virus tends to move.
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Additionally, the CDC noted in its statement that there is no evidence yet that women can transmit the disease through sexual activity.
