Federal health officials advised pregnant woman Friday to consider postponing travel to more than a dozen countries in South America, Central America and the Caribbean to avoid infection with the mosquito-borne Zika virus that has been linked to severe brain damage in newborns.
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The travel alert targets pregnant women and those who want to become pregnant and follows reports that thousands of babies in Brazil were born a year ago with microcephaly, a brain disorder experts associate with Zika exposure.
The travel alert applies to Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, Venezuela, and the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. “It causes fever, headache, skin rash, red eyes, muscle ache, that sort of thing”. There is no vaccine against the virus or antiviral treatment. According to the latest numbers from Brazil’s Health Ministry, 3,530 cases of microcephaly and 46 infant deaths may be linked to the virus. The babies born had small heads, a rare condition known as microcephaly. Women trying to become pregnant should also consult, it said.
Between 2007 and 2014, 14 cases of Zika virus were confirmed among travelers returning to the United States from South America, Petersen said.
The mosquitoes that typically spread Zika virus are not found in CT, state officials said.
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. USA health officials are heading to Brazil, where there’s been a recent spike in the birth defect, to further study the actual risk to pregnant women. It’s transmitted when a mosquito bites an infected person, and then spreads the obtained virus by biting others. The advice includes wearing long sleeves and long trousers and using insect repellent. “Closely related species are present in very low numbers and are unlikely to present a risk of Zika virus infection to people”.
The virus was found in fetal and newborn tissues of babies with microcephaly in Brazil.
The spread of Zika virus in the Western hemisphere and the possible link between the mosquito borne flavivirus and microcephaly has grabbed the attention of the public, the media and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The CDC is sending two teams to Brazil to do lab training and to see if the virus can causeGuillain-Barre syndrome, a type of progressive paralysis that can appear after a viral infection, Petersen told ABC News on Thursday. The best prevention strategy is taking steps to avoid getting bitten by mosquitoes.
“That’s exactly what we saw when chikungunya spread”, he said, referring to another disease that is carried by the same mosquitoes and has spread through the Americas in the past couple of years. One woman in Texas was recently diagnosed as having the Zika virus, but she’s thought to have contracted it while visiting Latin America.
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Petersen says it is too early to speculate if the Zika-microcephaly travel warning will still be in effect by the time of Olympics in Rio de Janeiro this summer. “These imported cases may result in local spread of the virus in some areas of the continental United States, meaning these imported cases may result in human-to-mosquito-to-human spread of the virus”, it said.
