With laboratory research in the Mount Sinai Health System now focusing on the Zika virus, the vast hospital complex is also prepared in the event there is a possible influx of patients testing positive for Zika.
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Consumer Reports tested 16 insect repellents for their effectiveness at repelling bites from the Aedes mosquitoes that can carry the Zika and Chikungunya viruses and the Culex mosquitoes, known to spread West Nile virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Puerto Rico could see “hundreds of thousands of cases of Zika virus”.
In Brazil, the hardest-hit country, more than 1.5 million people have been infected with Zika, and almost 1,400 cases of microcephaly have been registered since the outbreak began a year ago.
Schumer and Gillibrand are urging Congress to compromise and pass a plan that fully funds the Zika prevention and response programs before it’s too late to combat the problem and stop Zika from spreading to the United States.
Tiny Cape Verde is the only African nation affected by the so-called “Asian strain”, detected through the sequencing of the 7,500 Zika cases confirmed there. The CDC estimates an uptick in local transmission during the summer months due to more active mosquito populations, particularly in the Southern region of the United States.
Chan also said that family planning and sex education failures illustrated an “extreme consequence” of the disease, as causal links between the mosquito-borne virus and microcephaly, a condition which results in babies being born with severe brain abnormalities, become scientific consensus. “In our tests we found that lower levels are very effective”, said Calvo. Besides, “at the present moment, an efficient fight against the Zika virus consists first of all in efforts aimed at destruction of mosquitoes carrying it”, he said.
Characterizing her own remarks as a “stern warning”, Chan laid out various threats from West Africa’s Ebola outbreak, which has continued to flare, to Zika virus and urban outbreaks of yellow fever in Africa, which are increasingly the source of global concern.
It’s important to reiterate that there are now no reported cases of mosquitoes transmitting the Zika virus in Virginia or anywhere else in the continental United States. Zika also can be transmitted through sexual contact from a man infected with Zika to his sexual partners and d from pregnant women to their children during the pregnancy and birthing process.
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“We should have confidence in our ability to take care of it”, Obama said. “We must act swiftly to prevent a public health catastrophe”.
