It’s affordable, effective, and practical for widespread use – particularly in countries with underdeveloped healthcare infrastructures – and it’s also capable of telling the difference between Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases, including dengue and chikungunya.
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Malloy predicts there will be more travel-related cases of Zika in CT, and he wants travelers to be prepared.
A January 2016 Scientific American accounting of the virus’s travel identified South Pacific and Central American countries as major origination points of humans carrying the virus to California.
The patient became infected after sexual contact with a partner diagnosed with the virus after travelling to an affected region.
The KCDC advised pregnant women not to travel to Zika-infected countries, while recommending fertile women delay pregnancy for at least two months after returning from those countries.
Those who come in contact with the disease do not display the sickness symptoms 75% of the time, people who have Zika virus can potentially spread it without the realization of doing so, Weeks said.
“We would hope that it could be used to help individual patients who’ve become infected to more quickly realize that they’re infected and seek the treatment they need”, he said.
“We’re doing some work with those viruses right now to see if our local mosquito populations are susceptible”, he said.
Tennessee Department of Health officials are making moves to protect people in the state from the Zika virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health, says that the Zika virus itself is usually mild – but it is very unsafe for pregnant women and their fetuses, due to the risk that the babies will be born with a brain development defect known as microcephaly.
Andreatis said the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station will be closely monitoring the Asian Tiger mosquito for Zika this summer.
The virus is mostly spread to people through the Aedes aegypti mosquito, an aggressive, daytime biter. The U.S. territory has been suffering through more than a decade of economic decline since Congress phased out tax cuts that made the island a center for pharmaceutical and medical equipment manufacturing.
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A fast, cheap test that detects the Zika virus in monkeys might be useful for doctors working far from hospitals, researchers say. The mosquitoes that carry Zika bite during the day and night.
