A Danish tourist has been infected by the Zika virus after visiting southern and central America, Danish hospital officials say, but authorities said Wednesday it was not the first case in Europe.
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In Arkansas, the Department of Health said Tuesday that one person has tested positive for a mild case of the virus. Aliota says. “Now, we’re going to start looking at how that might be used for Zika virus control as well in South America”. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has urged pregnant women not to travel to countries that have reported cases of the Zika virus, an untreatable, mosquito-borne disease.
Transmitted by an aggressive Aedes aegypti mosquito, Zika is a part of the same family as yellow fever, West Nile, chikungunya and dengue.
Municipal workers pause to refill the insecticide sprayer during an operation to combat the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmits the Zika virus at the Imbiribeira neighborhood in Recife, Pernambuco state, Brazil, Tuesday, Jan. 26, 2016.
First found in Uganda in 1947, the Zika virus hasn’t been all that active for years and remained limited to Africa and Southeast Asia for years; however, in 2007, an outbreak occurred in the Pacific Islands and recently the virus began to spread in the Western Hemisphere.
Already, the CDC had advised pregnant women to avoid trips to Bolivia, Brazil, Cape Verde, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Saint Martin, Suriname, Samoa, Venezuela and Puerto Rico.
“The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito”, the minister told reporters as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.
In the U.S., no local transmission of the virus has been documented yet – so far it has only been diagnosed in people who’ve recently traveled to Zika hot spots. In 80 percent of the cases, most infected people have no symptoms.
Earnest says President Barack Obama has no plans at this point to appoint a “Zika czar” in the same way it selected someone to coordinate the administration’s response to Ebola.
Two major US airlines are offering refunds to passengers anxious about the Zika virus outbreak in many tropical countries.
Health officials are also investigating its link to a paralysis syndrome called Guillain-Barre.
If mosquitoes in the United States do become carriers, a model created by Toronto researchers found more than 63% of the USA population lives in areas where Zika virus might spread during seasonally warm months.
Castro said the government also would distribute mosquito repellent to some 400,000 pregnant women.
Since the outbreak in Brazil, other countries in the Caribbean and South America have reported infections. The virus can also be spread from an infected pregnant mother to the baby during pregnancy.
According to DeFrancesco, “there is much that we do not yet know about the Zika virus and its effects during pregnancy, for example, whether pregnant women are of greater risk of infection than non-pregnant individuals”.
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Dr Angela Rocha is from the Oswaldo Cruz University Hospital, which has seen more than 300 microcephaly cases in the last five months.
