United States scientists have confirmed the Zika virus, which has swept through much of South America, causes microcephaly and other severe birth defects.
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The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said there was an established link between pregnant women catching Zika and their babies developing microcephaly as well as other neurological abnormalities.
The CDC report noted many questions remain including the spectrum of defects caused by prenatal Zika infection, the degree of relative and absolute risks of adverse outcomes among fetuses whose mothers were infected at different times during pregnancy, and factors that might affect a woman’s risk of adverse pregnancy or birth outcomes. “It is now clear that the virus causes microcephaly”, said Tom Frieden, director of the US agency. Women who are pregnant or planning to become pregnant are advised to avoid travel to the at least 41 countries and territories where Zika has spread, and men who have been to those areas are advised to abstain from sex or use condoms with partners who are pregnant or trying to become pregnant.
Although scientists diagnosed the first case of Zika in a human in 1954, no one suspected it might cause birth defects until 2015 after the virus was detected in Brazil and reports of microcephaly began to climb.
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. Some experts hope it will change public thinking about Zika the way the 1964 surgeon general’s report convinced many Americans that smoking causes lung cancer.
“We feel it’s time to move from precautionary language to more forceful language to get people to take action”, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is leading WHO’s Zika response. The World Health Organization announced Thursday that, “based on a growing body of preliminary research, there is a 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. Further studies are being launched to “determine whether children who have microcephaly born to mothers infected by the Zika virus is the tip of the iceberg of what we could see in damaging effects on the brain and other developmental problems”, Frieden added.
Public health authorities are calling for aggressive mosquito surveillance and eradication, including campaigns to eliminate the sources of standing water in which mosquitoes breed. They should continue to avoid traveling to Zika infected areas.
“The CDC is the scientific gold standard”, said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
“This study marks a turning point in the Zika outbreak”. They also discovered more direct evidence in the form of the virus or its genetic traces.
A poll released last week found that about 4 in 10 Americans have heard little to nothing about the Zika threat.
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While mostly spread through the mosquito bites, the disease can also be transmitted through sexual contact.
