More than 3,100 pregnant Colombian women are infected with the mosquito-borne Zika virus, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Saturday, as the disease continues its rapid spread across the Americas.
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“President [Barack] Obama and we had an immediate, very affirmative response”, Santos said, as quoted by El Colombiano daily.
Zika virus most often only causes a mild illness, though it has been linked to microcephaly, a neurological disorder in which infants are born with undersized heads.
On Friday, Colombia’s health minister said – preemptively and perhaps incorrectly – that there was a “causal connection” between Zika, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and three deaths that occurred in the country, BBC reports.
On Friday, Brazilian health officials said they had found live samples of the Zika virus in saliva and urine samples – a discovery that prompted official warnings that casual kissing “increases the risk” of infection.
The Ministry of Health is also calling on people to clean up around their homes and destroy all mosquito breeding places.
But Santos, speaking on national television, said there was no evidence yet definitively linking the virus to the devastating fetal developmental disorder known as microcephaly, which leaves newborns with deformed skulls and underdeveloped brains.
These are the same mosquitoes that spread dengue and chikungunya viruses.
In the event an Aedes aegypti bites a disease-infected person in the central San Joaquin Valley, Mulligan said, “our initial focus will be to impact the disease transmission cycle, and we will be aggressive in increasing our efforts to reduce the numbers of adult and immature mosquitoes around the immediate area using approved public health insecticides”.
“By now, Government should start to accumulate data on Nigerians and foreigners travelling through our borders from countries where Zika virus outbreak has been reported”.
Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff has urged pregnant women not to kiss strangers as carnival season gets under way. The rise in cases of Microcephaly has refocused the discussion in Brazil around the absence of abortion as an option for women to control their bodies and reproductive choices. The virus is now believed to be spreading in 29 countries, mainly in Latin America. Sufficient information on them to health officials, which can be traced to them later, should be made available on disembarcation forms to allow Nigerian authorities make further enquiries, should the Zika virus-positive individuals be detected among them.
Delaware County Councilman David White addressed the concerns of the worldwide outbreak of the Zika virus, including the most recent case in Texas, at the February 3 public council meeting.
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“So what they saw is an exponential increase in microcephaly cases with the appearance of Zika virus”, Rutledge said. These include low-grade fever, joint pain, red eyes, rash and generalized symptoms such as muscle pain, physical weakness, lack of energy and headaches.
