The CDC reports that Zika can be passed from a pregnant woman to her fetus. The large white region is abnormal and indicates an accumulation of fluid in the brain. A pregnant pigtail macaque monkey was inoculated with a dose of Zika virus that was equivalent to a human being bitten by an infected mosquito. This suggests using pigtail macaques could help scientists understand how therapeutic interventions could protect foetuses from a Zika infection and prevent brain anomalies.
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The group reported its findings today in Nature Medicine.
“Our results remove any lingering doubt that the Zika virus is incredibly risky to the developing fetus and provides details as to how the brain injury develops”, notes Adams Waldorf.
The only people for whom Zika is seriously unsafe is pregnant women and their unborn children.
Adams Waldorf, Gale and Dr. Lakshmi Rajagopal, UW associate professor of pediatrics, led the project. Infection during pregnancy can cause certain birth defects. Within 10 days, there were brain lesions and other developmental problems. The study also provides hard evidence of the virus causing severe brain damage, leading to microcephaly.
“Infections with the Zika virus may be present without symptoms”.
Among the 22 infected people is a pregnant woman who is now in the care of obstetricians.
Previously, no experimental animal model closely emulated the effects of Zika virus infection during human pregnancy.
Efforts to control the spread of the virus focus on eliminating mosquito breeding sites and taking precautions against mosquito bites such as using insect repellent and mosquito nets.
It’s important to note that Zika is not particularly new, and that it’s relatively mild in comparison to other mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria, dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever.
– Some neighborhoods in Baltimore were sprayed for mosquitos due to concerns about the possible spreading of the Zika virus.
In other developments, Thailand reported several more Zika cases, many of them linked to a cluster in Bangkok, as the number of infections in Singapore grew steadily. The CDC is also investigating the link between Zika virus and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a serious and sometimes fatal muscle-wasting disease, and has stated that Guillain-Barré syndrome is “very likely triggered” by Zika in a small proportion of infections.
The Zika virus is spread by both mosquitoes and sexual contact with an infected person. The mother didn’t show any symptoms, such as fever, rash, or conjunctivitis.
In the macaque, the foetal brain stopped growing 3 weeks after infection, said the authors.
If this trend had continued for another month, the researchers said, microcephaly would have resulted.
In this January 18 photo, a female Aedes aegypti mosquito, known to be a carrier of the Zika virus, acquires a blood meal on the arm of a researcher at the Biomedical Sciences Institute of Sao Paulo University in Brazil. In addition, they found that the Zika viral genome was also present in other fetal tissues including, eye, liver, and kidney.
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Adams Waldorf said the work proves Zika infection in the womb causes brain birth defects – fulfilling a test known as Koch’s postulates. In fact, Gale pointed out, the virus level in the fetus’s brain was higher than that in the mother. The disease itself will leave your body in a matter of weeks (though there’s some evidence that it stays in semen longer), and once it has left your system, you are immune.
