CDC recommends that a pregnant woman with a history of Zika virus and her provider should consider additional ultrasounds.
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The first case related to travel within the continental United States appears to have happened this week, when a Texas man who visited Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood in late July returned home with El Paso’s first case of Zika infection, health officials reported. Texas has been taking severe precautions to prevent the possibility of local transmission in the state.
The El Paso County resident became ill and went in for testing. Florida Department of Health officials confirmed one new case in Pinellas County and two in Polk.
Miami has a small local cluster of Zika cases, which rose to 30 Monday with two more reported patients.
El Paso, Texas is one of a handful of US cities that has been closely monitoring Zika. “A very, very conservative guess would be that the medical costs of Zika would be around $600,000 for these families”, Jorge Alfaro-Murillo of Yale’s Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis told Wired. She had recently traveled to the Dominican Republic, one of the areas known to have mosquitos infected with the Zika virus. Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) is a rare disorder that can cause muscle weakness and paralysis for a few weeks to several months. There is no vaccine or specific treatment now available for Zika. While this species is not now in Washington, people who travel to and from areas where Zika is spreading can return with the illness.
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Health officials are investigating seven of the non-travel-related cases because they are not within the area of local transmission and do not appear to be linked to that area. None of the cases have been a result of the disease transmitted by mosquitoes in Texas. Although health officials didn’t require the outdoor entertainment area to close, co-founder Della Heiman said it was a management decision based on concerns about Zika symptoms in some employees. “This is another significant development, but not an unexpected one”. Additionally, there are 21 new travel-related cases in Florida, including 17 in Broward County, according to the Florida Department of Health.
