In Brazil alone, the country most affected, 1.5 million people were infected this virus discovered in 2015. A team found the virus in the plasma of three Haitian youngsters some two years before Haiti announced its first cases and months before Brazilian researchers verified the virus there. None of Lederman’s patients had tested positive, but if a private lab were to find a Zika infection, it would send the samples to the state for confirmation, O’Connor said.
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Also, the investigators added that the reliability of blood and cerebrospinal fluid tests to screen for Zika virus in newborns is still unknown.
But while preliminary findings from the first 32 cases involved in the study confirm causality, the researchers said, the true size of the effect will become clear only after full analysis of all 200 cases and 400 controls. Officials are monitoring more than 731 pregnant women with Zika in the 50 states and the District of Columbia and another 1,156 in the USA territories, a lot of them in hard-hit Puerto Rico.
But if it infects fetuses, Zika is now known to cause a wide array of birth defects, and some studies have suggested that the virus can continue to cause damage to the central nervous system after a baby is born.
In a report released Thursday, researchers from Brazil and Britain studied babies born this year in the heart of the epidemic in northeastern Brazil. Microcephaly is the condition where the brain is not able to develop normally that makes brains and heads undersized.
There are two ways this can happen: through the placenta, and through the amniotic sac. “There’s other things to be more vigilant about than the Zika virus”. The most common symptoms of Zika are fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis (red eyes).
On the first case from Johor, the genome sequence resembles the French Polynesia strain while the genome sequence in Sabah in the second case resembles the genome sequence of a local strain seen in Malaysia called Micronesia.
Laura Rodrigues, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: ‘The early findings from this case control study are the missing pieces in the jigsaw in terms of proving the link’. He continued, “There are other priorities like dengue fever, which is more prevalent and more risky, and we have to allocate our resources accordingly”.
Zika is spread mostly by the bite of an infected Aedes species mosquito.
In regards to Zika virus, Indonesia lacks facilities and funds to do any checks or research. But most of the testing will still be conducted by the Department of Health. People usually don’t get sick enough to go to the hospital, and they very rarely die of Zika.
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There is no cure or vaccine.
