In the study, the researchers derived the stem cells, called cortical neural precursors, from human induced pluripotent stem cells and found that the Zika virus easily infected these cells.
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“By April we’re likely to see widespread transmission in Puerto Rico and, by June, mosquito season is likely to start in parts of the U.S, where the mosquito that can cause Zika is present”, he said.
The research, performed by a team of United States researchers, has highlighted exactly how the pathogen attacks fetal brain growth and triggers microcephaly.
“Five of the nine affected babies or fetuses have either miscarried or shown evidence of birth defects”. Biomedical research experts at UNC said the number of cases is not high considering the amount of travelers that have areas with higher risk rates such as Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.
According to The Washington Post, such complications can occur at any stage of pregnancy.
Some of the abnormalities associated with Zika is microcephaly, where babies are born with small skulls due to incomplete brain development, trouble growing in the womb, poor development, calcifications in the brain, and poor blood flow to the brain, umbilical cord, or placenta.
Colombia has seen more than 47,700 cases of Zika, including thousands of pregnant women infected with the mosquito-borne virus, the country’s National Health Institute reported on Saturday, March 5. The women were tracked by US and Brazilian researchers at a clinic in Rio de Janeiro.
The virus has been linked to birth defects in the children of women who caught the virus while pregnant. No evidence has surfaced that women could spreading the virus.
Symptoms include fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes, but severe disease requiring hospitalization is uncommon and case fatality is low.
A link with microcephaly that was initially suggested with Zika was identified in fetuses and babies who had small brains and heads, Ming said.
The Zika virus is most often spread through the bite of an infected mosquito. This is a majority of the typical 40-week pregnancy.
The geographical distribution of Zika virus has steadily widened since the virus was first detected in the Americas in 2015.
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The researchers, led by Guo-li Ming and Hongjun Song of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Hengli Tang of Florida State University, with collaborators at the Emory University School of Medicine, worked around the clock for a month to conduct the study, which provides a new platform to learn about the Zika virus using neuronal cells derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. The study has appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine.
