This event was held to inform the public on this virus that causes birth defects in pregnant woman, but Minnesota is taking action and making sure mosquito around the state aren’t infecting residents.
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Or they have turned to help groups such as Women on Web who specialise in getting abortion pills to women in countries with restrictions via drone, speedboat or other methods.
In Brazil and Ecuador – where governments have issued health warnings on the danger to the fetus from maternal Zika infection – requests for abortion in 2016 have doubled from 2010 rates, the researchers reported.
“We know that Zika has been present in Southeast Asia and Africa for many years and yet has not taken off there as it has in South America”, says Jeremy Farrar, infectious disease specialist and director of the health charity which part-funded the research.
All of the women contracted the mosquito-borne virus while traveling overseas, Dallas Health and Human Services officials told CBS News.
In the countries where Zika warnings were issued, there are typically about 3.5 million abortions per year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organisation which was not involved in the study.
“When you issue these kinds of advisories, but you uncouple them from pathways to safe and legal care, you create a really hard situation for women”, said study co-author Dr. Abigail Aiken, a reproductive health expert at the University of Texas at Austin.
In Brazil, Venezuela and Ecuador, the figures nearly doubled.
The researchers compared abortion requests made after November 17, 2015, when the region was first warned about Zika’s potential risk of birth defects, with expected requests to this same group based on five years of prior data.
Doctors have also connected Zika to miscarriage and stillbirth, as well as eye defects, hearing problems, reduced growth rates and brain development delays in newborns.
Area and state leaders are gathering to address the growing concern for the Zika virus.
The illness is usually mild and only one of every five people who contract Zika actually get sick, according to the CDC.
The Zika virus is spread by infected Aedes mosquitoes or by sexual contact.
Researchers investigated whether the number of abortion pill orders in 19 Latin American countries is affected by the Zika virus alert.
Ten pregnant women in Dallas County have been diagnosed with the Zika virus.
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Women on Web recommends the abortion drugs be used up to nine or ten weeks of pregnancy, but it fails to mention that there is very little way of knowing at that point if the unborn baby or the mother really are infected with Zika.
