“The major concern, however, is women passing the Zika virus to a baby in utero”, Reingold said. The Zika virus is especially risky to pregnant women and their infants as it has been linked to microcephaly (a congenital disorder when the brain does not grow properly) as well as other neurological defects.
Advertisement
According to the governor’s office, the state is focusing on delaying local transmission and, most of all, preventing Texas women who are pregnant from getting the virus and passing on birth defects to their unborn children. One of Rubio’s opponents for his seat, U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, condemned Rubio’s statements. However, it warned this could change as the rain begins to fall.
While this money will help, the release of larger sums of more than $1 billion promised by the federal government, which would pay for research into a cure and provide agencies with the resources they need to do what they say they must do, have been tied up in partisan congressional wrangling.
This 2006 photo provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows a female Aedes aegypti mosquito in the process of acquiring a blood meal from a human host. And since I practice in Miami, I might also ask patients if they have been in Wynwood, the neighborhood where local mosquito transmission has occurred.
A divided Congress – obsessed with assessing blame rather than solving problems – went on a seven-week recess in late June after failing to fund legislation to combat the Zika virus, the mosquito bite that causes babies to be born with malformed heads and damaged brains. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a travel warning advising pregnant women to avoid the Wynwood area. Now that the 2016 Olympic Games are officially underway in Rio De Janeiro, the world is holding its collective breath for the athletes and their families, hoping they won’t be affected. As of July 28, the World Health Organization reports that almost 2,000 babies are affected with microcephaly or central nervous system malformations associated with Zika worldwide. “There’s special groups of people – if it’s a female intending to get pregnant or a male whose spouse is intending to get pregnant, they should take special precautions”, Rey says.
A clinical Phase 1 trial of an anti-Zika vaccine was recently launched by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Florida officials have responded aggressively, dispatching crews to find and test people who may have been exposed to the virus, fumigate around homes and businesses, and empty the standing water where mosquitoes breed. Men are known to carry the virus for up to six weeks.
“I’m looking for the reasonable response”, he said, “and I don’t think I have enough clarity to make that judgment yet”. “I am not at all sure how all that works”, he said.
Advertisement
“We still need the federal government to show up, the president and Congress have to work together and this is an worldwide issue, not just a Florida issue”, he said.
