The U.S.is monitoring almost 300 pregnant women with likely Zika infection, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday. While the Centers for Disease Control has consistently released numbers about the reported cases in the United States, they have not broken down the total number of women who have it.
Advertisement
Officials highlighted that’s crucial for pregnant women who may have been exposed to the virus to seek testing from their doctor or health center to monitor the pregnancy. However, recent reports from the CDC can give us some insight as to just how many women have Zika in the United States.
Zika virus infection has been associated with miscarriage as well as birth defects like unusually small brains, called microcephaly. Maricopa County Vector Control searches for mosquitoes with even more interest from the public because of the Zika virus. That’s in addition to more than 120 women affected by Zika in US territories, mainly Puerto Rico.
The CDC said it will begin reporting the numbers on a weekly basis and separate them into two systems – the U.S. Zika Pregnancy Registry and the Zika Active Pregnancy Surveillance System in Puerto Rico.
“We will be following these babies born to mothers with evidence of Zika infection for at least one year and in some cases, up to three years”.
None of the infected cases from mosquitoes have originated in the United States. “We do not have local transmission of Zika in Arizona at this time”, said Christ.
The latest report comes at a time when USA health officials have been clamoring for adequate funding to support mosquito protection and eradication, development of anti-Zika vaccines and better diagnostics, and long-term studies needed to follow children born to infected mothers and to better understand the sexual transmission risk.
There is no vaccine to prevent Zika. For months the number of cases appeared to rise steadily and by April stood at 48 in the continental states.
“It is likely that the South American, Caribbean and Polynesian populations had no prior immunity to the virus”, Dr. Anna Checkley of the University College London’s Hopstial for trpoical Diseases says. Obama has asked Congress to allocate $1.9 billion to combat the Zika threat.
On Thursday, the Senate approved P1.1 billion in funding for this objective, but the House only allocated only P622 million.
“This is something that is solvable”. “We don’t know how often when they get infected, their babies are infected”. “To the extent that we are not handling this thing on the front end, we are going to have bigger problems on the back end”.
Advertisement
Obama said that raising a child with microcephaly and providing him or her the proper support could cost up to $10 million over the child’s lifetime.
