“What we found is there are two things the Zika virus can do: First, it will kill some of the neural stem cells that are responsible for forming part of the brain and, also, it will slow down the growth of the neural progenitor cells if they’re not bad yet”, Ming said.
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They tracked the women throughout their pregnancies; so far, eight have given birth. Medical Daily explains. The researchers then exposed the three types of brain cells to the Zika virus and analyzed the result. The findings are the first concrete evidence of a link between the mosquito-borne virus and the disorder, which until now had been circumstantial, said Guo-li Ming, a professor of neurology at The Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering, and a co-leader of the research. “This is truly the virus from hell”, said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.
Dr. Ganeshwaran Mochida, pediatric neurologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said the study is an important early step in understanding the virus’ affect on immature cells.
In Maryland, four people have been diagnosed with the Zika virus, and there have been more than 100 cases nationwide-primarily among travelers who have visited affected countries.
Health officials said all of the residents had contracted the virus after traveling in countries where the Zika virus is present.
The virus has infected people across 282 Colombian municipalities, 67 percent of them women.
The scientists took lab-grown neural stem cells and neural progenitor cells – the building blocks of the brain – and infected them with the Zika virus in culture dishes. However, no strong associations between Zika and microcephaly has been found yet.
The Zika virus is most often spread through the bite of an infected mosquito.
A lab study has found that Zika can infect embryonic cells that help form the brain, adding to evidence that the virus causes a serious birth defect.
“It does not directly give the proof that this is exactly what the Zika virus is doing in the fetus”. Colombia, the second Latin American country to get hit with Zika, has started to report Zika-linked cases of microcephaly.
“But as the Zika virus story has unfolded there has been speculation about the mechanism, which this study addresses”.
Overall, ultrasounds detected abnormalities in the fetuses of 12 of 42 women who had Zika, including two babies who were born small for their gestational age, and one with microcephaly. But scientists are alarmed by indications that when it infects a pregnant woman, her baby may be born with a small head and a brain that hasn’t developed properly.
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The WHO’s Emergency Committee is due to meet on Tuesday to review “evolving information” and its recommendations on travel, trade and mosquito control in what is thought to be high season for transmission of the virus in the southern hemisphere.
