The virus can cross the placenta from the mother to her unborn child.
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The debate has also become a key issue in the U.S. Senate race.
President Barack Obama in February requested $1.9 billion in emergency funding to fight the virus. In May, the U.S. Senate approved a $1.1 billion package, while the House passed legislation providing $622 million. “Some of them we really can’t answer”, said Dr. Diana Racusin, an OBGYN maternal-fetal medicine expert with UT Physicians.
While the investigation is still underway to determine how the Zika virus infected the person in Palm Beach County, the state has maintained that the active transmission of Zika virus has been confined to a square-mile area in Miami-Dade County. “This was no great surprise”, that Cayman now has locally transmitted Zika, he said.
Monroe County health officials on Tuesday confirmed a case of travel-related Zika, a woman who recently returned from a trip outside the country. Though Zika-related deaths and birth defects are rare, there is no cure for the virus and the Aedesspecies prefers to live in heavily populated cities where it can feed on human blood and find plenty of its favorite breeding grounds: water-filled containers and tires.
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton urged federal lawmakers now on summer recess back into session to pass a crucial funding bill to combat the Zika virus as she visited a health clinic at the heart of a local outbreak in Miami yesterday.
“She was in El Salvador, and my understanding is she is from El Salvador traveling here to Harris County”, Shah said, “but I can’t give you anything more cause I don’t have those details, but to tell you that she came to Harris County in her second trimester”.
Late on Monday, the health department announced the first known case of Zika contracted on the islands, by a man who had also not travelled to affected countries.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides more information on mosquito-borne diseases.
Texas has reported 97 Zika cases, all contracted during travel overseas.
Six of those children also had microcephaly – a condition where children are born with abnormally small of the heads often associated with the Zika virus.
Because van der Linden’s paper was a case series study that only examined a handful of patients, there’s no way to estimate the prevalence of arthrogryposis among infants exposed to Zika virus in the womb.
All these cases “are related to travel overseas to areas with active Zika transmission”, said the statement.
While most of the cases in the United States are believed to have been contracted by people who traveled overseas, most recently the Center for Disease Control said it was a mosquito-borne illness in a particular area of Miami, he said.
The seven babies with suspected Zika infection that they studied in hospital had been born with hip, knee, ankle, elbow, wrist and/or finger joint problems that fit with a medical diagnosis called arthrogryposis.
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Another 369 cases in Florida were brought in by people who were infected while traveling outside the United States.
