The virus has been active in Central America and parts of South America.
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Researchers analysed travel patterns from countries and territories with Zika outbreaks and found that cities in southern Florida and impoverished areas in southern Texas may be particularly vulnerable to local virus transmission.
Zika has been linked to thousands of birth defects in Brazil and the illness is spreading through Latin America and the Caribbean.
The outbreak in French Polynesia began in October, 2013, and ended in April, 2014, during which more than 31,000 people were believed to have been infected. Of these, 5 pregnancies were terminated through medical abortion (average gestational age 30.1 weeks), and 3 cases were born.
Brazil said it has confirmed more than 740 cases of microcephaly, and considers a lot of them to be related to Zika infections in the mothers.
“While there is much we still do not know about the dynamics of Zika virus transmission, understanding where the Aedes aegypti mosquito can survive in the U.S. and how its abundance fluctuates seasonally may help guide mosquito control efforts and public health preparedness”, Monaghan said.
A woman infected by the Zika virus during the first three months of pregnancy faces a one-in-100 chance her child will suffer severe brain damage, according to a study released Wednesday.
“It remains to be seen whether our findings apply to other countries in the same way”, he said.
New Zika virus cases push the numbers higher in the United States, but is it cause for panic already? There were eight cases of microcephaly diagnosed between September 2013 and July 2015; however, seven of the cases were identified during a 4-month period toward the end of the outbreak.
The Ohio Department of Health can now test blood samples of people who show symptoms of Zika virus to detect the mosquito-borne illness. This provides us with a small, yet much more complete dataset than data gathered from an ongoing outbreak. “Our findings support WHO’s recommendations for pregnant women to protect themselves from mosquito bites”.
Derek Gatherer, a virus expert at Britain’s Lancaster University, said this was “the first published study that moves us in the direction of being confident that Zika virus infection in pregnancy can cause microcephaly”.
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“If you take 1 percent of the many pregnant women infected, clearly this is a big concern for public health”, Cauchemez said.
