“Pregnant women should consider avoiding travel to countries with the Zika virus – or if travel is unavoidable, they ought to seek travel health advice from their GP or a travel clinic well in advance of their trip”.
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Many doctors and health officials believe the Zika virus is linked to an unprecedented outbreak of babies born with small heads in Brazil.
But when an organ transplant patient tested positive for Zika after developing a fever, the hospital’s blood bank staff started looking for other possible Zika cases and tests on the gunshot victim’s blood samples came back positive. The move paves the way for the development of a vaccine.
Since October, Brazil has reported 404 confirmed cases of microcephaly – up from 147 in 2014 – plus 3,670 suspected cases. “We have to wait for more scientific evidence”, said Cuitlahuac Ruiz, director of epidemiology at the Mexican health ministry.
Neither one of the women was hospitalized because of the primarily mosquito-borne virus, the release said.
But sexual transmission would complicate matters.
The news comes a day after South American health ministers held an emergency meeting in Uruguay on the disease.
She said Zika was now present in 26 countries across the Americas.
It remains unclear exactly how the Zika virus, which could infect millions within the year according to health experts, is transmitted and whether it can possibly be transmitted through sexual intercourse.
“Their response to this problem will be to fight against the mosquito that transmits the virus”.
On Feb. 1, the World Health Organization declared that a rise in the number of birth defects and other neurological conditions possibly linked to the Zika virus constitutes a global public health emergency.
Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Jamaica and the USA territory of Puerto Rico have all warned women not to get pregnant.
Transfusions in the two cases were traced to separate donors who had Zika, both of whom reported having suffered symptoms days after they gave blood.
French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi earlier said it had begun researching a vaccine for Zika, for which there is now no specific treatment.
But he said that for the World Health Organization “the most important thing to do is to control people’s exposure to mosquitoes”.
Someone who visited Venezuela and was infected there developed Zika symptoms as did their sexual partner who never left the United States, he said on Twitter.
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The WHO warned member states in Europe on Wednesday that the risk of the virus spreading into the region increases with the onset of spring and summer.
