The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday the Zika virus can cause birth defects like very small heads and other neurological damage in the fetuses of infected mothers.
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“It is now clear that the virus causes microcephaly”, CDC director Tom Frieden said in a news release.
Scientists also need to know the range of defects caused by a prenatal Zika virus infection, as well as explore any other factors that could influence birth defect risk.
Women who are pregnant or considering becoming pregnant are advised to avoid the more than 30 places in Latin America and the Caribbean where Zika is circulating, and to wear mosquito repellant if they live in those areas. However Zika virus continues to spread explosively in America, where there has been an increasing number of cases of microcephaly. It does not mean, however, that all women who have Zika virus infection during pregnancy will have babies with problems. The World Health Organization announced Thursday that “based on a growing body of preliminary research, there is scientific consensus that Zika virus is a cause of microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome”, a rare condition in which the body attacks its own nerve cells, causing paralysis.
Until now, the CDC has suggested that evidence shows that there is a link between Zika and birth defects, but was never definitive with their statements. “Will it cause learning problems later in life?”
In response to a question at a press briefing today, Dr. Sonja A. Rasmussen, the CDC’s director of the division of public health information and dissemination, said women who are infected with the Zika virus and get pregnant later should not be overly concerned.
Some of the scans showing severe microcephaly in babies’ brains.
The CDC cautions that USA researchers had found no “smoking gun” to link Zika to microcephaly, according to the full report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We have studies that are ongoing that we hope will answer these questions as soon as we possibly can”, she said.
Risk level of having a baby with a problem after mother is infected.
“In those cases [in the U.S.], the virus has either been passed through sexual transmission or they were bit by a mosquito where they went”, Barnes said.
“We do these things because we want to be sure that people take action on the recommendations that we make”, said Rasmussen, editor in chief of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and an expert in birth defects research. Since previous year, doctors in Brazil have been linking Zika infections in pregnant women to a rise in newborns with microcephaly, or an unusually small skull.
The Zika virus is mostly non-fatal in healthy adults.
“There is no longer any doubt that Zika causes microcephaly”, Frieden said.
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Most people who are infected have no symptoms at all, but some infected individuals experience mild flu-like symptoms and skin rashes.
