The New Jersey Department of Health on Thursday confirmed the state’s first human case of West Nile virus this year, in a 48-year-old Camden County man who remains hospitalized; information about the disease is posted here.
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The county agency said the mother had been tested for Zika but test results had been inconclusive. The baby’s mother was infected with the Zika virus in Latin America and passed the virus to the baby in the womb.
There have been 59 cases of Zika virus in Texas, including three in pregnant women.
In the NY case, transmission of the virus occurred on the day that a woman in her 20s returned to the country’s largest city from an area with active Zika transmission and had a single event of unprotected sex with a male partner.
Only about one in five people gets sick from Zika, and symptoms such as fever, rash, headache, joint pain and conjunctivitis are mild in most cases. Health officials have said the virus also can be transmitted sexually.
After the woman developed Zika symptoms, she went to her doctor. The Zika virus was discovered in the Zika forest in Uganda in 1947 but it did not begin spreading until a year ago.
Before traveling overseas, HCPH recommends individuals contact their healthcare provider who may recommend vaccines or important preventive medication for travel-related diseases. It’s probably the best-known outcome of women contracting Zika when pregnant. In addition, the woman involved in the case started her period shortly after they had sex.
“We are concerned about the Zika virus because people do not know everything they need to know”, Levine said at a Richmond news conference on Wednesday.
“The virus is very similar to the dengue virus, and transmitted by the same mosquito”.
Zika, carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, is associated with a birth defect called microcephaly which causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and brain damage. Mosquitos can only transfer Zika if they have bitten a person infected within a week of the person being infected. The virus has not yet been found in local mosquito populations.
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As of July 6, 2016, the CDC has reported 2,526 cases in USA and it’s territories.
