Health officials are investigating whether the virus is linked to birth defects in the children of women who caught the virus while pregnant.
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A breakthrough report published yesterday could provide an important link between the Zika virus and the birth defect microcephaly, and will likely serve as a springboard for local research efforts into the mystery illness, Hub scientists say.
Apart from its links to microcephaly, an irreversible condition in which babies are born with abnormally small heads and brains, it is also suspected of causing Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder.
The Zika virus infects a type of neural stem cell that gives rise to the brain’s cerebral cortex, Johns Hopkins and Florida State researchers report March 4 in Cell Stem Cell.
The new study enrolled 88 pregnant women from Rio de Janeiro who had developed a rash (a sign of Zika infection).
A study of 28 women in Colombia’s Sucre province infected with Zika during pregnancy has so far yielded one baby with microcephaly, said Alfonso Rodriguez-Morales, a doctor and researcher at the Technical University of Pereira. They included calcification of the brain, placental insufficiency with low to no amniotic fluid, fetal growth restriction and central nervous system damage, including potential blindness.
“We think microcephaly is only the tip of the iceberg”, said study co-author Dr. Karin Nielsen-Saines, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Contra Costa County officials said one case was confirmed last week and the other was determined in early February but officials refrained from making them public because they felt there was no danger to public health, Balladares said.
As of Tuesday, the CDC reported there have been 153 cases of Zika virus infection in 28 states (not including Missouri) and the District of Columbia linked to travel in areas where Zika is being spread.
However, many people who become infected with the Zika virus show no symptoms.
“We know people would be interested in knowing this information, but a lot still needs to be done”, Tang said.
FILE – Caio Julio Vasconcelos, who was born with microcephaly, undergoes physical therapy at the Institute for the Blind in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, Feb. 25, 2016.
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In the study, they looked at the way Zika impacts the cortical neural progenitor cells, in comparison with how it affects two other cell types: immature neurons and induced pluripotent stems cells. And in another case, a baby had to be “urgently delivered” from a woman with a later Zika infection, because the baby would have died otherwise, she said. Today in Brazil – as in many countries affected by the current outbreak – nearly no one in the population has antibodies to Zika, meaning nearly no one is immune.
